LANGUAGE-PICTURE INTERACTION IN ADVERTISEMENTS: A MULTIMODAL APPROACH

Abstract

This article studies interesting print advertisements, i.e., those with intriguing pictures, which are viewed here as types of multimodal discourse with an implicit transfer of meaning. It proposes that the advertisements have a unique surface structure, involving concise verbal and unexpected visual elements in interaction, which at the cognitive level prompt multimodal metaphors and metonymies used for inferring meaning. The aims are 1) to show that the intended meaning mainly stems from the interaction of two modes, i.e., language and picture, 2) to specify the dominating types of verbo-visual interaction, and 3) to point to the use of multimodal metaphor and metonymy as the main cognitive structures underlying the carefully designed structure of creative advertisements. Five common types of verbo-visual interaction are identified, whereby surface, i.e., verbo-visual and cognitive dimensions in creating meaning are unified. The specified types of verbal and visual elements in interaction are based on the notion of the level of verbal figurativeness and the visual creative continuum, rather than the notion of rhetorical figures. The article detects the typical functions of multimodal metaphor and metonymy and particularly stresses the role of multimodal metonymy in interaction with multimodal metaphor and the RESULT FOR ACTION multimodal metonymy. It is proposed that the picture acts as an attention-grabber, but that meaning inference results from the interaction of the language and the picture, i.e., multimodality.