Semiotics of Advertising and the Discourse of Consumption

I will discuss possible approaches to the use of semiotics, semantics and pragmatics in the analysis of advertising discourses in English language media. I will discuss the rhetoric of the image and the stylistics of consumption. The aim of this article is twofold: by analysing advertising discourse, I want to gain insight into the construction of advertisements and at the same time provide a means for a de-manipulative look at the discursive construction of social and cultural identities through consumption. This leads into the linguistic and semiotic analysis of advertising texts and images using a constructionist approach, combined with the analytical framework of social semiotics, visual design, rhetoric, stylistics, text linguistics, and critical discourse analysis.