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Multimodality in Canadian print advertising: Different functional connections between headlines and visual texts of advertisements in English and French consumer magazines

  • Erhard Lick (b. 1967) is a professor at the ESCE International Business School, Paris <erhard.lick@esce.fr>. His research interests include international marketing communications, branding, multimodality, and applied linguistics. His publications include “Advertising to Canada's official language groups: A comparative critical discourse analysis” (with J. Kuhn, 2009); and “The myth of cultural differences between English and French Canada” (2010).

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Published/Copyright: March 27, 2015
Semiotica
From the journal Semiotica Volume 2015 Issue 204

Abstract

The aim of this study was to reveal whether French and English Canadian print advertisements show different functional connections between headlines and visuals. For that purpose, a content analysis was conducted on advertisements drawn from two Canadian women's magazines. As theoretical construct, Rentel's (2005) typology of logical-semantic connections between visuals and headlines of advertisements was chosen. The results showed that the strategies of visual-verbal analogy and hyperbole were used more frequently in the French than in the English advertisements analyzed. Hence, French advertisements appear to stimulate a higher level of cognitive elaboration on the part of the recipients.

Keywords: intercultural advertising; semiotics; multimodality; content analysis; cognitive psychology; Canada

About the author

Erhard Lick

Erhard Lick (b. 1967) is a professor at the ESCE International Business School, Paris <erhard.lick@esce.fr>. His research interests include international marketing communications, branding, multimodality, and applied linguistics. His publications include “Advertising to Canada's official language groups: A comparative critical discourse analysis” (with J. Kuhn, 2009); and “The myth of cultural differences between English and French Canada” (2010).

Published Online: 2015-3-27
Published in Print: 2015-4-1

©2015 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2014-0084
Keywords for this article
intercultural advertising; semiotics; multimodality; content analysis; cognitive psychology; Canada

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Gender equality in Swedish child health centers: An analysis of their physical environments and parental behaviors
  3. The semiotics of emotion and narrative therapy in the case of Montaigne
  4. On the concept of translation: A perspective based on Greimassian semiotics
  5. Burqa and the human umwelt
  6. A memorable thirteen-word sentence
  7. On the characteristics of verbal irony
  8. Tying in comment sections: The production of meaning and sense on Facebook
  9. Multimodality in Canadian print advertising: Different functional connections between headlines and visual texts of advertisements in English and French consumer magazines
  10. Language, communication, and speech: Human signs in global semiosis
  11. The calligram and the title card
  12. Harnessing the unconscious mind of the consumer: How implicit attitudes predict pre-conscious visual attention to carbon footprint information on products
  13. Otherness as a paradigm in anthropology
  14. Chasing the myth: A Harley-Davidson story(telling)
  15. Communicology and human conduct: An essay dedicated to Max
  16. Saussure's équivalence sémiologique in the case study of Czech sonants
  17. A semiotic study on modality in Chinese Criminal Law and its English version
  18. Color, shape, and sound: A proposed system of music notation
  19. Reading Deleuze through the lens of Hermeticism
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