FROM CREOLIZED TEXTS TO MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE: A THEORETICAL SHIFT IN ADVERTISING ANALYSIS

Abstract

Contemporary digital advertising has rendered the Soviet-derived concept of “creolized texts” analytically insufficient. This article argues, from a psycholinguistic and social-semiotic perspective, that Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) provides the theoretically adequate successor framework for studying verbal-visual meaning-making in cross-cultural advertising. Drawing on the visual grammar of Kress and van Leeuwen, Forceville’s theory of multimodal metaphor, Fauconnier’s mental spaces model, and the Uzbek psycholinguistic tradition of Safarov, the study presents a comparative corpus analysis of 100 automotive advertisements (50 English, and 50 Uzbek) collected from the official web platforms of Land Rover (UK) and BYD (Uzbekistan) between 2022 and 2025. The analysis demonstrates that the two corpora employstructurally distinct multimodal strategies: Land Rover campaigns construct individualistic survival metaphors through adversarial landscape composition, low-key chromatic registers, and minimal verbal anchors, while BYD’s Uzbek-market campaigns build metaphors of collective prosperity and spiritual blessing through centered composition, warm chromatic palettes, family- oriented gaze structures, and culturally resonant verbal activators such as “baraka”. These findings confirm that multimodal meaning-making is a culturally situated practice and that the reception of multimodal metaphors is shaped by culturally specific mental spaces within the receiver’s linguistic consciousness. The article concludes with methodological recommendations for future experimental reception on multimodal research.