Meeting ID: 917 0116 7001

Passcode: 223066

Abstract

In this talk Ms Elena Pocock will present some work she has completed so far for her PhD thesis, which is devoted to the analysis of skincare advertisements as found in American Vogue fashion magazine. Having set up a corpus of 100 advertisements spanning the years of 2020-2024, the study aims to identify the argumentative and meaning-making strategies present within each advert. The study considers skincare advertisements as examples of multimodal and goal-oriented texts which offer the implicit argumentative standpoint of “You should buy skincare product X.” Advertisements also put forward arguments in support of this standpoint, offering reasoning in the form of text and images. Consumers or viewers of such advertising messaging also form an active part of the argumentative discussion, drawing the necessary inferences which allow them to reach a given conclusion. Having first adopted a semiotic approach, employing the methodological framework of Roland Barthes, and then an argumentative one, employing the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT), the thesis concerns itself with the understanding that skincare advertisements, having the task of promoting an experience good, aim to bridge the experiential gap by making the ingredients of the product, the producer, and the results a customer may expect as visible and palpable as possible. This is arguably achieved through a combination of text and visuals and remains a consistent finding within the dataset, despite the fact that advertisers often seek to distinguish themselves from their competitors. This talk will specifically focus on the argumentation perspective of my research, including the challenges that lie ahead when it comes to adopting more methodological tools to improve the handling of multimodality within the dataset. 

Some key references:

Barthes, R. (2013). The Language of Fashion. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic

Birdsell, D. S. & Groarke, L. (1996). Towards a Theory of Visual Argument. Argumentation and Advocacy, 33(1), 1-10.

Groarke, L., Palczewski, H. C. & Godden, D. (2016). Navigating the Visual Turn in Argument. Argumentation and Advocacy, 52, 217-235.

Machin, D. & vanLeeuwen, T. (2003). Global schemas and local discourses in Cosmopolitan. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(4), 493-512.

Marsh, C. (2007). Aristotelian Causal Analysis and Creativity in Copywriting: Toward a Rapprochement Between Rhetoric and Advertising. Written Communication, 24(2), 168-187. doi: 10.1177/0741088306298811

Perelman, C. & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1969). The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation (J. Wilkinson and P. Weaver, Trans.) (2nd ed.). Indiana, IN: University of Notre Dame Press

Rigotti, E., & Greco, S. (2019). Inference in Argumentation. Switzerland: Springer Cham. doi: more information is available online.