Book reviews: Mimi Huang and Lise-Lotte Holmgreen (eds), The Language of Crisis: Metaphors, frames and discourses

Abstract

connection with specific consumers, thus generalizing the audience to a larger group. Embedded intertextuality, whose aim to persuade consumers to purchase is concealed because its style tends to be more sophisticated and more smoothly combined (p. 191), is also more frequently employed in this period, resulting in a natural promotion of the products and thus a more equal and harmonious relationship between advertisers and customers. The concluding chapter summarizes these findings, clarifying the kinds of ideological values in culture, social relations, economy, and politics, manifesting the features of ideology being both dynamic and static, and reporting the implications of the ideological values relative to their variations, usages, and functions of advertisements. This book adds new perspectives to Chinese advertising research by addressing political, economic, cultural, and historical elements previously ignored. Following Altheide’s concrete research procedures and classifying ideological elements according to Dyer’s checklist of visual images and Halliday’s functional grammar, it suitably combines these theories to meet the end of this research and thus presents an illuminating example of a systematic analysis of the ideological factors in both the verbal and visual aspects of advertising discourse. Therefore, it offers insights into the careful examination of Chinese advertising multimodal discourse for follow-up CDA investigations. The author’s implementation of the diachronic method provides a model for analyzing dynamic data that are constantly evolving.