Mentioning the unmentionable: visual representation and Multimodal Discourse Analysis of the selected Polish and American social campaigns.

Abstract

The present dissertation is a work in the fields of pragmatics, cognitive linguistics and Multimodal Discourse Analysis whose macro goal is to investigate the mechanisms that govern social campaigns in their presentation of taboo. The author pursues the goal by carefully analyzing the selected Polish and American social advertisements dealing with a broad variety of issues. The aim of the thesis is to deconstruct the taboo in the advertisements and to present the underlying techniques, methods and strategies utilized its construction. Additionally, the thesis aims at taking under scrutiny various linguistic devices such as metaphor, metonymy, implicature and presupposition. The author seeks to examine how the aforementioned facilitate presentation of taboo and the reasons behind their application.In order to achieve the highest quality of results, the dissertation considers the very broad social context of each of the advertisements and does not limit itself to linguistic analysis exclusively. Therefore, the Multimodal Discourse Analysis is the key approach used to examine the research material as is puts strong emphasis on extralingusitic aspects of presentation. For that reason the author explores much more than the verbal or textual layer as she investigates the visual, aural and filmic properties of each advertisement.