MULTIMODAL ADVERTISING: SEMIOTIC AND COGNITIVE-PRAGMATIC ASPECTS

Abstract

The article focuses on the analysis of the multimodal advertising of the Nokia brand from a semiotic and cognitive-pragmatic perspective. The aim of the article is to identify the secondary signifieds of the brand discourse and the features of their actualization through verbal, visual, and auditory advertising modes. This goal is achieved through several tasks, including identifying connotations related to the auditory mode in the context of its intertextuality; specifying secondary signifieds actualized by visual metaphors; determining the interface of pragmatic and cognitive parameters in visual metaphors; justifying the role of secondary signifieds in constructing the target consumer identity of the Nokia brand. It is found that key secondary signifieds constitutive of the brand discourse are connotative meanings such as "self-expression," "inspiration," and "classicism." These connotations, embodying the motivational needs of the target consumer identity of Nokia, are intended to displace the primary signifieds associated with the functional purpose of the brand's products as mobile communication devices. Visual and verbal images of classical guitar and violin, as well as auditory intertextual borrowing of a classical melody in the brand's ringtone, are used to create secondary signifieds that metonymically connect the brand with classical music and inspiration. These secondary signifieds appeal to two types of consumer identities: those with motivational needs for self-realization and creativity and those with needs for continuity, traditions, and stability. Images of classical musical instruments serve as source spaces for visual metaphors and intertextuality, in blends of which the secondary signifieds of the brand discourse are reconstructed. The reconstruction of signifieds is carried out through discursive implicatures, establishing the quantity, transparency, quality, and coherence of information disrupted by metaphors or intertextuality as means associated with deviations from cooperative maxims. The restored implicatures shape propositional-locutionary content, which, in the elaboration stage of the blend, takes on illocutionary forces of an indirect commissive act—promising to satisfy the motivational needs of the target audience in self-expression, heritage, and traditions—and an indirect directive, urging to fulfill these motivational needs through the acquisition of the brand's products.