Cognitive Operations in Eco-Friendly Car Advertising

Abstract

This paper presents a corpus-based analysis of printed eco-friendly car advertisements in English in line with the growing consumer interest in environmental issues and the development of green advertising. The aim of the research is threefold: 1)to unveil the content cognitive operations (for the purpose of this research, metonymy, metonymic chain, metaphoricamalgam and metaphor) underlying the ads and their modes of representation; 2) to examine the relationship between (i)these conceptual operations and the environmental claims made by advertisers, and (ii) the environmental claims made byadvertisers and the text-image interaction. In this light, the paper yields two major findings: a) the cognitive operationsunderlying our corpus are usually rendered in the visual and verbal modes; b) the environmental claims underlying the adscorrelate with the conceptual content and the text-image interplay. The conscious use of these mechanisms by advertiserscan help the manner in which messages are interpreted.