| Summary: | 碩士 === 元智大學 === 應用外語學系 === 99 === Nowadays, a great number of articles embark on studying the usage of visual device in advertising. Further, more and more researchers attempt to deal with the interrelationship between verbal and visual performance in advertising.
However, less attention has been paid on the cooperation of visual and verbal rhetoric in print advertising, especially in a certain quantity of authentic data. This study hence investigates both visual and verbal rhetoric in print advertising in respective and cooperative approaches.
The materials I selected are one hundred twenty advertisements from a series of Time publications per month in 2009 and 2010. Sixty are ads with more than three sentences, whereas the other sixty are ads with less than three sentences. The information framework of the verbal analyses is based on Cockcroft and Cockcroft (2005), dealing with verbal structure as well as sentence function in print advertising. The basic analyzed typology of the cooperation of visual and verbal rhetoric is adapted from Phillips and McQuarrie (2004), concerning image structure and meaning operation. The notions of relevance theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson in 1986 are also utilized to interpret the classified results, which derive from the cooperation of visual and verbal rhetoric in my analyzed data.
The findings of my study are that there are three possible necessary stages shown in the verbal structure in the analyzed ads: (1) introduction; (2) proposition, or determination of the point at issue and (3) proof of the case. Introduction means the headlines shown in advertising. Proposition or determination of the point at issue indicates the products which are designed to promote. Proof of the case provides the advantages of the promoted merchandize. Three stages present the strong relevance with the promoted merchandize of advertising. Additionally, the persuasive structure of my analyzed ads performs diversely in response to advertisers’ needs.
The pattern (juxtaposition: connection) in the most of the analyzed ads in this study represents intuitional interpretation to the advertising. It symbolizes the most transparent strategies in combing verbal performance and visual representation in print advertising. Audiences can also consume the least processing efforts in interpreting the advertising based on this pattern. Juxtaposition is a way of the images projected by the text and picture that co-occur in advertising; Meaning operation represents that the meanings conveyed by words and pictures clearly connect to each other.
The additional information of the print advertising contains websites, brands and the post scriptum. Websites provide available resources for audiences to further respond the advertising. Brands offer audiences essential schemata to decipher the advertising. Post scriptum promptly leaves the space for advertisers to replenish what they attempt to convey but may be inappropriate to arrange to the text. These three additional components dominate ads with less than three sentences with the purpose to help audiences interpret the advertising accurately.
The arrangements of the advertising in analyzed forty-nine corporations reveal that most of corporations adopt similar the arrangements of advertising based on the same consumerist ideology. The framework of consumerist ideology is adapted from Goatly’s (2000) theory. It creates the most impressive sensation for audiences to perform similar the arrangements of advertising based on the same consumerist ideology in the same corporation, equivalent to considerably strengthening the audiences’ familiarity with the ads in the same corporation.
My theoretical findings are expected to be the useful bases for advertisers toward the best persuasive efficacy of the print advertising or for investigators further to testify the rationality of my results in terms of readers’ response.
|
|---|
