EVOLUTION OF AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN ADS: SEMIOTIC PERSPECTIVE

The present study views semiotic characteristics of American presidential commercials and their evolution throughout 1952-2020 election campaigns. The paper offers a review of studies on multimodal text semiotics, giving a general description of the relationship between verbal and non-verbal components of campaign advertising texts and proposing a typology of correlations between the verbal and nonverbal components of presidential campaign commercials. The study reveals primary extralinguistic factors that lead to a number of developments in the semiotic evolution of American pre-election TV ads. These developments include gradual complication of relationship between text and images in campaign ads, increase in the images’ semantic charge, growing importance of paralinguistic features of presidential ads, changes in visual representation of the target audience and rising significance of emotional and expressive connotation of visual components of presidential ads (latter partially effected by the growth of negative campaign advertising). The mentioned processes are reflected in the structural-semantic correlations between verbal and non-verbal components of the commercials. The analysis shows that the number of correlation types used in a single ad is growing together with the range of visual means used to implement each correlation type. This in turn leads to the tendency of text-image correlations narrowing down to the level of a separate statement, phrase or even word as opposed to the whole text of the ad, especially in the case of the interpretation modifying correlation. The role of visual components (images, visual effects, paragraphemics, on-screen texts) in implementing the amplifying correlation is gaining importance. There is a tendency towards reflecting changing socio-demographic characteristics of the target audience through visual representation. Significance of the contrasting correlation and non-verbal emotional persuasion as part of the amplifying correlation is increasing as the negative campaign tactics assume greater importance.