María Jesús Pinar

Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Spain

A multi-modal discourse analysis of advertising

The main aim of this paper is to analyse the main visual semiotic resources used in political advertisements in the context of election campaigns. There is no doubt of the importance of images as point of departure for the activation of symbolic networks and cognitive schemata which provoke interpretative effects in the receiver of the message.

The range of political advertising is wide, from party political broadcast to advertisements published in newspapers or posters. In this paper, we focus our attention on posters, analysing a selection released by the main British parties (Labour and Conservative) during the election campaigns of 1997 and 2001.

Kress and van Leeuwen (1996, 1998) and Jewitt and Oyama (2001), among other linguists, develop a method of social semiotic analysis of visual communication, rooted in Halliday’s metafunctions of language. Any image, these authors argue, not only represents the world (whether in abstract or concrete ways), but also plays a part in some interaction and, with or without accompanying text, constitutes a recognizable kind of text (a painting, a political poster, a magazine advertisement, etc.). Therefore, we will focus our attention on the detailed analysis of the corpus which reflects the importance of visual communication as a way of producing múltiple modes of expression.

References:

HALLIDAY, M.A.K. (1994) Introduction to Functional Grammar. Arnold.

KRESS, G. and T. Van LEEUWEN (1996) Reading Images: Grammar of Visual Design. Routledge.

KRESS, G. and T. Van LEEUWEN (2001) Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. Arnold.

Van LEEUWEN, T. and C. JEWITT (2000) The Handbook of Visual Analysis. Sage.