An Intercultural Approach to Multimodality in Selected German, Anglo-American, Italian and Turkish Cosmetics Advertisements

Abstract

Multimodality is a term, which refers to the co-presence and mutual linking of multiple semiotic resources at different levels in communication. Nowadays the various media such as TV, mobile phone or internet provide to create new text forms which include a variety of semiotic modes. As a result of this, today’s texts contain complex modalities. Texts are therefore seen as multimodal structures, which combine various semiotic resources such as language, image, music, sound and typography. Advertisements are one of the most ideal multimodal text examples because of their potential of combining and integrating highest levels of different semiotic modalities. Advertisements are therefore one of the most analyzed text types in multimodal oriented text researches. The aim of this study is to analyze and compare German, Anglo-American, Italian and Turkish print advertisements moving towards a multimodal oriented method, which is based on text linguistics. The corpus is comprised of eight cosmetics advertisements of different international brands, which were published in German, American, Italian and Turkish women’s magazines in 2016. The analyzed advertisements are derived from the following magazines: Cosmopolitan (German Edition), Vogue (USA Edition), Silhouette Donna (Italy) und Elele (Turkey). The analysis is based on multimodal oriented text analysis models of Angelika Hennecke (1999), Nina Janich (2010) and Hartmut Stöckl (2011). Furthermore the analysis include text extern and text intern criteria. Framed in multimodal analysis and intercultural comparison this paper presents the similarities and differences between these print advertisements in four different languages.