Multigeneric Intertextuality in Advertising: Discourse Strategy from a Cognitive Perspective

Abstract

Advert recipients have wide-ranging experiences of perceiving other texts. When these experiences become the basis of perceiving advert messages, we speak of intertextuality operating as a discourse strategy. This paper studies multigeneric intertextuality in printed advertising, i.e. delivering an advert message through a register or text-form typical of other genres, for which discourse analysis and the genre studies perspective are adapted. From the cognitive linguistics perspective, it focuses on how the experience becomes the basis of building an emotive and attitudinal layer of meaning via exploring the recipient’s mental space. The article studies cues signalling intertextual processing, specifically cues of socially determined discourses such as cooking recipes, warning signs, computer-mediated communication, scientific discussions or travel brochures, which may function as mental space inducing cues in the collected adverts. It also deals with how intertextuality in adverts can be scaled and how the level of explicitness relates to promoting various categories of products.