THE ROLE OF MULTIMODAL MEANS IN EXPRESSING PROHIBITION

Abstract

The article deals with the study of verbal and non-verbal means’ interaction actualising the speech acts of prohibition communicated in the spheres of publishing and advertising, as the ones aimed at engaging readers or consumers by making use of catching slogans and powerful graphic means. To define the specificity of techniques used to influence the recipients, the author singles them out into two main types: verbal (language means that represent the concept of prohibition), and visual (non-textual content of a message which consists of such aspects as graphic images, colour, and font). The study results were based on the analysis of 53 front covers of the British journal “The Economist” as well as the ads that contain the idea of prohibition. By way of using the outlined language means’ interaction, it has been found out that actualisation of prohibitive speech acts in advertising and publishing is ensured by the predominance of verbal means that contain the formula do + not + verb serving as a straightforward appeal to the recipient. The verbal message of prohibition is supplemented by colourful images, pictures, multimodal lexical units, or symbols which draw people’s attention to the encoded problem. In this case the prominence is given to colour as a dominant constituent part that not only accentuates the message visibility in the advertisement in the first place, but also helps convey its particular deep meaning, like a set of values of a country or a variety of common associations that it traditionally brings up in different cultures. Such a characteristics can be explained by a concise form of an advertisement and consequently the creators’ purpose to influence the recipient within a short period of time. Thus, the decoding of such multimodal images requires orientation in the general notions the senders refer to, as well as the time or period when it was released since extra-linguistic factors carry additional semantic loading. In view of this, the author concludes that the application of the detailed description of instrumentality to the study of multimodal means’ interaction makes it possible to present a comprehensive description of invariant patterns typical of published multimodal texts belonging to different genres.