Chapter Overview

• • multimodal stylistics

• • communication in advertising

• • checklist of multimodal categories

• • multimodal stylistic analysis of two adverts

Introduction

In our analysis of all the different text types in the previous six chapters, we have focused exclusively on verbal texts. In this chapter, we use mainstream stylistic frameworks along with the tools of visual grammar in the analysis of multimodal advertisements. We will be looking at the way verbal and visual elements in advertisements interact to create meaning and effect. The chapter is in two parts. The first part offers an overview of the nature of communication in advertising, an outline of the multimodal framework, and a checklist of categories for the analysis of multimodal texts. In the second part of the chapter, we carry out multimodal analyses of two adverts by relating features in the verbal and visual components in the adverts.

Communication in advertising

An advertisement is a discourse situation. It involves an addresser who is exchanging thoughts with an addressee about a particular subject. It involves an advertiser promoting (for sale) to a consumer or consumers goods or services through print media, television, internet, or any other advertising medium. Not all advertisements, however, sell products or promote services. Non-product advertisements promote charitable, political, or social events.

The meaning and effect of an advertisement are often carried linguistically by words and by other modes of representation, notably the visual mode. This multimodal nature of communication in the advertising register calls for an analytical methodology that treats meaning and effect as a configuration of textual and visual choices, hence MULTIMODAL STYLISTICS.

The approach combines mainstream stylistic approaches to the verbal text, in our context pragmatic stylistics, with Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen's visual grammar approach to other semiotic modes. Analysis of the verbal text covers the way consumers are targeted directly or via speech acts and presuppositions, the use of directives and politeness markers, and the way the participants in the advert are located in time and space via deictic expressions. Analysis of the visuals, on the other hand, covers the construction of meaning via the visual material, the positioning of the viewer in relation to the participants, and the placement of the visual material on the printed page.