Grenzen in Bild und Text oder Bild und Text ohne Grenzen? Versuch einer textlinguistischen und semiotischen Werbungsanalyse
Boundaries in Image and Text or Image and Text Without Boundaries? An Attempt at a Text-Linguistic and Semiotic Analysis of Advertisements

Author(s): Ivana Jozić, Sara Ćavar
Subject(s): Semiotics / Semiology, Theoretical Linguistics, Philology, Marketing / Advertising
Published by: Društvo germanista u Bosni i Hercegovini (DGuBiH) / Germanistenverband in Bosnien-Herzegowina (GViBH)
Keywords: advertisement; text; image; text-linguistic and semiotic analysis of advertisements;
Summary/Abstract: This article focuses on whether there is a clear boundary between text and image in advertisements or whether these boundaries are fluid. Advertising’s integral role in our daily lives leads the casual observer to perceive the advertisement as a whole, i.e., as a combination of linguistic and non-linguistic signs. But has it always been this way? The qualitative analysis of advertisements published in the newspaper “Slavonische Presse” from Osijek, written in German, spanning from 1895 to 1904, aims to reveal a gradual transition within the corpus. Focusing on advertisements for Kathreiner Kneipp Malzkaffee, these are identified as dominantly appellative texts that use both linguistic and non-linguistic signs for persuasive purposes. This diversity of signs makes advertisements a frequently analysed subject in a semiotic framework. Peirce’s categorisation of icons, indexes, and symbols aids in selecting advertisements with varied pictorial representations. The hypothesis suggests that the analysed advertisements contain elements in both text and image that mutually reference each other, transcending semantic boundaries despite being from distinct systems.

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