Cognitive Operations in Eco-Friendly Car Advertising

Abstract

ABSTRACT. This paper presents a corpus-based analysisof printedeco-friendly car advertisements in English in line with the growing consumer interest in environmental issues and the development of green advertising. The aim of the research is threefold: 1) to unveil thecontent cognitive operations (for the purpose of this research, metonymy, metonymic chain, metaphoricamalgam and metaphor) underlying the ads and their modes of representation; 2) to examine the relationship between (i)these conceptual operations and the environmental claims made by advertisers, and (ii) the environmental claims made byadvertisers and the text-image interaction.In this light, the paper yields twomajor findings: a) the cognitive operationsunderlying our corpus are usually rendered in the visual and verbal modes; b) theenvironmental claims underlying the adscorrelate with the conceptual content and the text-image interplay.The conscious use of these mechanisms by advertiserscan help the manner in whichmessagesare interpreted. KEYWORDS: Cognitive operations;Green advertising;Environmental claims;Multimodality;Text-image interplay.