The Generic Structure of Print Advertisement of Elizabeth Arden’s INTERVENE: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis

Abstract

The Elizabeth Arden campaign with Catherine Zeta-Jones as the brand ambassador has deployed the semiotic resources of language and visual images. The analysis of this paper is based on the systemic functional linguistics (SFL) proposed by Halliday (1985, 1994) and Halliday and Matthiessen (2004), which says that a text is understood to simultaneously function three metafunctions: Ideational, Interpersonal and Textual. O’Toole’s (1994) framework of analysing visual images, which follows the main concept of SFL, is also used in the analysis. A multimodal discourse analysis is then applied to analyse one of the series, Intervene, using Cheong’s framework (2004), which combined both frameworks to find the generic structure of this advertisement. Further, this paper also analyses the intersemiosis of the linguistic and the visual resources using Wee’s (2009) intersemiotic mechanisms. It concludes that the interplay of the language and the visual image has proved to be very effective in the meaning-making process of this print advertisement.