Ads —part of our lives: Linguistic awareness of powerful advertising

What is it about?

This is one of the very first studies in multimodality internationally. Abstract: It has been claimed (Cook 1988, 'Stylistics with a dash of advertising' Language & Style) that advertising too, just as literature, is characterized by poetic language, involving deviations such as metaphor, ambiguities, etc. I argue that even in the absence of such literary devices as metaphor, lexical or anaphoric ambiguity, double meanings, etc., advertising discourse still employs stylistic techniques ingeniously used in order to construct prospective consumers (Fairclough 1989, 1992). Moreover, it is suggested that ads are seen and act as powerful rhetorical arguments since their objective is persuasion and seduction.

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Why is it important?

This is one of the very first studies in multimodality internationally. The analysis combines both text and picture examined both contextually and socially. It's a paradigmatic analysis in the thorough use of both text linguistics (discourse analysis) and of the picture as text.