Multimodal Text Analysis of Three Modern Greek Printed Advertisements Employing the Persuasive Modes of Ethos, Logos and Pathos

Abstract

Innovations in graphic design and computer technology allow a more complex integration of different semiotic resources (linguistic, spatial, visual, and so on) in the printed page and thus a greater level of abstraction and meaning-compression in the modern text (Baldry, 2000; Baldry and Thibault, 2005). Such complex multimodal texts increasingly characterise contemporary society. Multimodal texts, like all texts, are units of meaning which carry out a specific function in a specific social context, combining various resources to this end. For this reason all semiotic modes that work together to produce an overall text meaning are culturally specific (Kress, 2010, p. 8). Since multimodal texts involve many interacting systems of different kinds on different levels of organisation, they can be analysed within a social semiotic metafunctional framework, combining Halliday’s metafunctional theory with Bakhtin’s views on intertextuality and genre. The same framework is used for the analysis of the multimodal texts in this chapter. The chapter provides a comparative multimodal text analysis of three Modern Greek (M. Greek) printed advertisements both in terms of the metafunctions and of a more detailed mini-genre analysis, in order to identify similarities and differences between the specific instances and thus enhance understanding of the multimodal genre of the printed advertisement in M. Greek culture. The three M. Greek advertisements, which are translated into English, have been selected on the basis of the mode of persuasive writing that is employed in the linguistic text; that is, Aristotle’s rhetorical appeal to ethos, logos, or pathos.