Multimodal metapragmatics of German advertising discourse

Abstract

The article analyzes metacommunicative utterances in German advertising discourse, which proves the possibility of integrating metapragmatics with multimodal pragmatics. Metapragmatics studies metacommunication, i. e. the organization and management of speech interaction by means of linguistics. Multimodal pragmatics focuses on the properties of linguistic units in discourse types, which are based on the combination of several sensory and communicative modes. Multimodal metacommunicative utterances use combination of several sensory and communicative modes to express meanings regarding the course of communication itself. German advertising discourse shows two types of metacommunicative utterances according to the criterion of authorship: protagonist’s and advertiser’s comments. The protagonist’s comments are about his speech act and about himself. The advertiser’s comments are about the protagonist, utilitarian information, image and product quality. Metacommunicative utterances can be placed in almost all structural parts of the advertising text: visual context, title, subtitle, main text, slogans, enter utilitarian information and be integrated into the product image or logo. Serving as a local strategy for attracting and maintaining contact with the recipient, metacommunicative utterances belong to perlocutionary intensifiers, which aim to increase their influence on him in order to achieve perlocutionary success – to encourage the recipient to buy a product or use a service. At the same time, a discursive act of metacommunicative contactive is realized, which can be explicit or implicit. The indicating devices of its explicitness are: lexemes of locutionary, illocutionary, perlocutionary and epistemic semantics; prepositions, pronominal adverbs and pronouns that correlate in terms of content with the previous or following utterances; graphic means of direct speech. If such indicating devices are not available, the metacommunicative utterance implements an implicit metacommunicative contactive, where the metacommunicative component of meaning is contained in the implicature. From a structural point of view, metacommunicative utterances are declarative, exclamatory, imperative and interrogative sentences, as well as parenthetical phrases.