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Part of
Persuasion in Public Discourse: Cognitive and functional perspectives
Edited by Jana Pelclová and Wei-lun Lu
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 79] 2018
► pp. 281–302

Chapter 12
Iconicity in independent noun phrases in print advertising

A multimodal perspective

This chapter studies the interplay of multimodal iconic signs that construct the meaning of independent noun phrases in advertisements promoting food products. The methodology consists in approaching the diagrammatic iconicity found in language through the perspective of Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996, 2001) analytical framework of multimodal text and the perspective of typeface design and impression variables as described by Henderson, Giese and Cote (2004). The analysis reveals that independent noun phrases iconicize the process of production, the ingredients used, the variety of products, and gustatory perception. The language diagrammatic iconicity in the analyzed advertisements is achieved by a sequential ordering of modifiers that mirrors either chronological order or the order of importance, and by means of figurative language, lexical cohesion, and a lack of explicit syntactic relations. Both typographic and visual iconicity tend to objectify the semantic dimension of the diagrammatic iconicity. At the same time, the visual iconicity mirrors a close spatial relation between the consumer and the product.

Keywords: language iconicity, visual iconicity, typographic iconicity, noun phrases, premodification, postmodification, multimodality, advertising discourse, persuasion
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Iconicity and its role in advertising
  • 3.Data and methods
  • 4.Results of the investigation
    • 4.1Iconicity of production process
    • 4.2Iconicity of the ingredients used
    • 4.3Iconicity of the variety of products
    • 4.4Iconicity of gustatory perception
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Primary sources
  • References
  • Web pages consulted
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For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 8 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.79.13pel
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