Abstract
Departing from the facts that imagery dominates advertising and that advertising is a kind of argumentation, this article examines the argumentation of advertisements that are predominantly pictorial. In most cases, visual argumentation is best elicited though the audience knowledge of a specific rhetorical situation with a mixed difference of opinion, where two parties hold opposing standpoints. Commercial advertising, on the other hand, is best described as a single, non-mixed difference of opinion where only one party (the advertiser) is committed to defending only one standpoint, namely the common claim shared by all advertising: Buy this! This ultimate proposition is defined as the final claim. Knowing the final claim, the advertising genre and its general context of difference of opinion, gives the viewer a starting point for discovering the premises supporting the final claim, which makes it possible to reconstruct the pictorial argumentation. Such reconstruction is challenged by the semiotic ambiguity of pictures. However, the author proposes that visual rhetorical figures – meaning both tropes and figures – can help delimit the possible interpretations, thus supporting the evocation and creation of the intended arguments about product and brand. Because figures are regularised patterns, they offer cognitive schemes enabling the (re)construction of the embedded arguments. This theoretical point is illustrated through analysis of four predominantly pictorial advertisements. The author demonstrates how visual figures function argumentatively by directing the viewer’s attention toward certain elements in the advertisements, thereby offering patterns of reasoning. This guides the viewer towards an interpretation with certain premises that support a particular conclusion. The analyses support three general theoretical points: Firstly, it illustrates the ethotic argumentation of an artful visual execution. Secondly, it demonstrates how the presence of visual figures helps delimit the possibilities of interpretation, creating advertisements that are semantic and semiotically open in some respects and closed in others. They are closed in the sense that particular rhetorical figures guide the viewer’s construction of the arguments in the ad in question. Thirdly, the analyses support the theoretical claim that pictures can offer a rhetorical enthymematic process where something is condensed and omitted, and, as a consequence, the spectator has to provide the unspoken premises. Rational condensation in pictures is considered the visual counterpart of verbal argumentation. The author ends by advising against the view that pictorial argumentation is simply a matter of extracting verbal lines of reasoning and presenting them in argumentation models. Pictures are able to provide vivid presence (evidentia), realism and immediacy in perception, which is difficult to achieve with words only. Pictures may offer a semantic thickness in the richness of visual detail, and a semantic thickness in the semantic condensation of the thoughts and emotions connected with the actual, depicted situations. These are important argumentative dimensions.
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Kjeldsen, J.E. (2012). Pictorial Argumentation in Advertising: Visual Tropes and Figures as a Way of Creating Visual Argumentation. In: van Eemeren, F., Garssen, B. (eds) Topical Themes in Argumentation Theory. Argumentation Library, vol 22. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4041-9_16
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