MEANING CONSTRUCTION IN INDIRECT COMMUNICATION: EMPIRICAL APPROACH

Abstract

This paper is an applied cognitive linguistic research into the mental process of meaning construction taking place in the minds of message recipients in the communication process. The object of research are advertisements in which a special type of indirect, soft-selling advertising strategy is used; this strategy involves associating logically unrelated concepts. The aim of the research is to experimentally test how message recepients arrive at implicitly expressed meaning in advertisements. For that purpose an experiment focusing on one carefully chosen advertisement was conducted in which the examinees were asked to explain the meaning of the advertisement as well as to explain how they had arrived at that meaning. The examinees` answers were analyzed and interpreted with a special focus on the following issues: a) the linguistic and visual elements which prompted the examinees to reason in a certain direction, b) the ways in which the given linguistic and visual elements in the advertisement were elaborated into certain scenarios on the basis of extralinguistic, i.e. encyclopedic knowledge, and c) the spotted analogies between the logically unrelated elements in the advertisement. The main hypothesis was that the cognitive mechanism of conceptual integration is at the back of interpreting meaning. Thus, the Theory of Conceptual Integration was applied to the analysed data obtained in the experiment. The analysis showed that the elements which the examinees spotted in the advertisement, whole scenarios which they built from them, analogies and mixed mental pictures correspond to the elements, relations, mental spaces, mappings, projections and blended spaces in conceptual integration.