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Gudrun Held

Magazine Covers – A Multimodal Pretext-Genre

Despite the great scientific interest that linguists have recently shown in the media, magazine covers have hardly been subject to linguistic research. This is the more astonishing as front covers are omnipresent contact texts. Their multimodal character, which combines visual and verbal elements into complex persuasive messages, has a great influence on the competitive press market in two different ways: on the one hand it represents a complex form of advertisement whose visual-verbal rhetorics, in addition to selling the product, also enhance the pleasure in the reading of the text. On the other hand, in its function as a label or even a ‘window’, it can be considered an important pretext which announces, indicates and appraises subsequent texts inside the magazine. In the light of this overall captatio function, this paper intends to give a first overview of the most important visual and verbal means attested in my data – selected covers of Italian and French magazines compiled in the last decade. The language of covers, which is intentionally anchored in a creative visual, proves to be an extensive repertory of deictic forms of which the main function is cataphoric reference. While these are considerated as genre-constitutive according to some underlying semantic-functional criteria, others are occasional tricks created just to capture the reader’s attention. From a strategic viewpoint covers, especially those of the Italian media, are full of such rhetoric devices which mainly cluster in the headlines and their interface with the dominant visual element. Very often, the comical effect that front covers achieve in their immediate context derives from processes of deviation from conventional sign-relationships.

Folia Linguistica, Walter de Gruyter

Print ISSN: 0165-4004
Volume: 39, 06/2005
Pages: 173 - 196

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