Text-Image Relations in Print Advertisement: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis

Abstract

The present paper focuses on the semantic relations that hold between the text and image in advertisement. Advertisement is a discourse genre in which both textual and visual modes are employed for attaining communicative goals. The paper investigates text-image relations in commercial and noncommercial advertisements. Drawing upon the recently developed field of multimodal discourse analysis, within Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics, particularly Martinec & Salway's system, the paper examines the integration of the textual and visual modes and the ways they contribute to the meaning-making process in the genre.