ABSTRACT
Advertising makes a great deal of use of direct address for both ideological and practical reasons. As different modes of communication have become used in a much more integrated fashion, they have also become an important focus of research in what is often referred to as multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis. Analysing visual communication is therefore an important part of critical analysis, be it in the media, advertising, or any other texts accompanied by visual designs. An important concept in the analysis of Western visual communication is the idea of ‘Given’ and ‘New’ which refers to the way visual and verbal language is placed in a newspaper, magazine or advertisement. Advertisements and other promotional texts and lifestyle magazines are full of visuals that have been modified in terms of colour, brightness and saturation and therefore have been lowered in modality. The advertisement displays both a Given–New and an Ideal–Real composition.
