RETHORIC AND MULTIMODALITY

VISUAL DESIGN IN FOCUS

Abstract

The multimodal speech compositions, extensively employed nowadays, present a great challenge for the linguist who aims to analyze them, once those discourses may be composed of several non-verbal languages. Thus, the language scientist should count on interdisciplinary knowledge to perform an integral qualitative analysis that takes into consideration the many layers of meaning that emerge from those analytical objects. In this paper, the interdisciplinary aspect relies on the link that Rhetoric creates with Design – visual composition. Such a link will be done to analyze the selected object of investigation, the Christmas advertising video from Edeka – a German company –, entitled Weinhnachten 2117 (Christmas 2117). Through the analytical correlation of those two theories, a rhetoric analysis will be performed, and it will be discussed the way that Design elements may influence the argumentative process. As one of the unveiled results of the analysis, the influence that Design elements hold on ethos construction of the main character of the video has to be pointed out. As a consequence of this interdisciplinary discovery, it may be argued that this multimodal ethos construction might aid in the adherence process of the auditory towards the validation and acceptance of the analyzed discourse.