Multimodalidade e as estruturas desgarradas em anúncios publicitários: uma estratégia para favorecer a sedução

Abstract

This research investigates the use of ‘unattached structures’, so named by Decat (2004, 2011), in advertisements. According to Decat (2004, 2011), the ‘unattachment’, whether of NPs or clauses, would be a way of marking the importance of such constituent for an informational structure. For the present analysis, five advertisements produced in Portuguese and published in national media were selected. It is assumed that the ‘unattached structures’ would be at the service of evidencing what these advertisements propose. In this sense, it is of great relevance to bring forward the four metafunctions proposed by Halliday (1989) so that it is possible to consider advertisements as multimodal productions and, in this way, to discuss the postulates defended by the Theory of Multimodality, in terms of the Grammar of Visual Design such as developed by Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006), considering the text in its visual and verbal aspects, assuming that the visual and other semiotic modes follow certain communicative purposes. In the end, it is concluded that the unattached structures, associated with the elements of multimodality, represent an important constituent of the advertisements so that the valorization of the product is evidenced. The ‘unattached structures’ have the strong function of highlighting information with great relevance for the consumption of an idea or a product to be effective; in other words, we conclude that the information in an advertisement can gain a prominence thatwould not have been possible if it wasn't ' unattached.