View Abstract

Title :

The Communicative Functions of the Image Act in Advertisements

Authors :

Nneka Rachel Igbeneghu

The unwritten interaction established when people look at one another, either directly or indirectly, in real-life situations is also present in the viewer/image relationship in visual communication. Interpersonal interaction in visual communication involves a represented participant (image or human) and an interactive participant (viewer). The interactions among people, places, and objects represented in images have been studied by many scholars from diverse perspectives, including semiotics, cognitive approaches, visual literacy, text-image relations, multimodal discourse analysis, art history, and aesthetic composition. However, little attention has be which refers to the interpersonal interaction that occurs when individuals engage visually with one another or with images in visual communication. This study adopts Kress and van Leeuwen's (2006) social semiotic framework, The Grammar of Visual Design, which is grounded in Hallidayan metafunctions within Systemic Functional Linguistics, to examine the meanings that emerge from the viewer/image relationship in selected German magazine advertisements. The aim of the study is to uncover the types of meanings generated through viewer/image interpersonal interaction in specific social contexts and to identify the strategies advertisers in the selected German magazines employ in the placement of their advertisements. The findings reveal that visual contact with images establishes a form of interaction that influences the viewer. The study further demonstrates that images perform prevalent in the selected German magazine advertisements. The study concludes that exploring the image act fosters critical thinking and supports diverse meaning-making processes in the teaching and learning of foreign languages.