Schematization, frame evocation and affect in multimodal ads and campaigns

Abstract This paper focuses on the use of three visually presented frames — Lungs, Twin Towers, and Ice Cream — across a range of multimodal, public-facing, broadly ‘persuasive’ discourse (including advertising and online campaigning). We focus on metonymic frame evocation as the primary mechanism by which these multimodal artefacts prompt affective responses, with a special focus on evocations by means of minimalist, schematized visual representations of the chosen frame, reducing the level of detail involved but strengthening affective impact (we refer to this phenomenon as affective enrichment ). In the final section, we focus on examples of ads or campaigns (involving, again, the frames of Lungs, Twin Towers or Ice Cream) in which the frame evocation is unsuccessful and ineffective, with visual overload and persuasive bleaching ( Dancygier 2023 ) producing conflicting or unwelcome persuasive and affective inferences. Overall, our analysis of schematization and affective enrichment presents an alternative meaning-making strategy to the process of image-schematic scaffolding ( Dancygier and Vandelanotte 2017 ) in multimodal discourse, set out in earlier work.