Visual Grammar of Advertisements: A Multimodal Analysis of Advertisements of Educational Institutions

Abstract

The current study aims at the analysis of verbal language, pictures, and other images of advertisements, which are pregnant with meaning potential. Such images are structured through visual grammar that can be employed to translate the meanings of images. The study focuses on investigating the linguistic (verbal and non-verbal) techniques employed in advertisements by educational institutions to persuade the readers. The study undertakes six advertisements of three chains of educational institutions of Punjab (Punjab Group of Colleges, Superior Group of Colleges, Aspire Group of Colleges) for the multimodal analysis applying visual grammar (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006) to examine the representational, interactive, and compositional meanings. The results espouse and advocate the theory of visual grammar and emphasize the potential of non-verbal language to formulate and convey several layers of meanings. The conclusions drawn, support the idea that images help in influencing and shaping the minds in favour of one, ignoring and rejecting the other.