Rhetorical Transformations in Multimodal Advertising Texts: From General to Local Degree Zero

Abstract

The import of rhetoric in advertising research has been steadily gaining momentum since the 1980’s. However, insights generated by drawing on the discipline of rhetoric have varied considerably among different schools and research streams. The same holds for the notion of multimodality, which gained currency through the discipline of Social Semiotics (Kress and Leeuwen), while being ingrained in Structuralist Semiotics (i.e. Greimas), Film Semiotics (i.e. Carroll, Metz, Buckland), Cognitivism (i.e. Forceville) and Visual Semiotics (i.e. Groupe μ, Sonesson, Eco), but also consumer research (i.e. Mick & McQuarrie, Philips, Scott). This paper aims at engaging in a fruitful dialogue among different rhetorical approaches to multimodal advertising texts, as voiced from different schools within the wider semiotic discipline and consumer research streams, while addressing the fundamental issue of how multimodal advertising texts assume meaning through rhetorical transformations.