Publication details
Iconicity in mutlimodal texts of print advertisements
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | If the principle of both language and visual iconicity is used in the discourse of advertising, an advertisement has a higher potential to influence the consumer’s cognitive states by encouraging him or her to invest more time and energy in decoding the extra meaning found on both textual and visual levels. The search for this intended meaning enables the consumer to become a more active participant in this one-way public type of communication, and thus to enhance both the persuasive effect as well as the aesthetic impression when ‘reading’ an ad. Print advertisements are nowadays understood as multimodal texts in which both verbal and non-verbal codes are employed for a successful message delivery. The visualization of the verbal code enables the words to function as graphic signs in which the visual iconicity of the typeface and typography objectifies the semantic dimension of the words used (Pelclová 2018). Following the principle of a diagrammatic iconicity found in language, Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996, 2001) visual grammar, and Henderson, Giese and Cote’s (2004) typeface design, the poster examines print advertisements on food and medical products in which visual and language iconicity participate in meaning construction. The objective is to study how the language diagrammatic iconicity and the visual iconicity together with the typographic iconicity cooperate in order to iconicize product-related and/or consumer-related traits the advertiser considers be the most salient and thus worth accentuating in the message being advertised. To be more specific, the study analyses the traits of 1) the production creation, 2) the ingredients used, 3) the variety of products or ingredients, and 4) product experience. The poster introduces which means of visual and language iconcity are used for which of the four traits mentioned above, and how the means of iconicity are distributed among the iconicized traits. |
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