Entrepreneurship in Selected Advertisements Products in Nigeria: A Multimodal Discourse Analytical Perspective

Abstract

Multimodal discourse and, or communication’s ubiquitousness in human language has become important covert and overt meaning expression not only in Nigeria but also on global entrepreneurship discourse platforms. Academic averring abounds on how verbal texts and visual modes combine to give purported meanings in various discourse context with some lacuna in entrepreneurship discourse, advertisement for instance. This study, therefore, investigates multimodal discourse strategies in order to examine the functional operation of certain communicative elements that guarantee productive propagation in the advertisements of some selected Nigerian products. Metafunctional insights selected from Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s Grammar of Visual Design are deployed to reveal how visual components are used by advertisers to attract ensuing viewers. The data, which consists of four purposively selected products (Indomie Noodles, Golden Penny Noodles, Maggie Star and Knorr Cube) and sourced from the internet were subjected to multimodal discourse analysis (MDA). The study found that advertising discourse makes use of descriptive verbal and visual modes to raise the awareness of the consumers about a particular product. To this end, verbal and visual modes, with a shoal of visual-grammatical networking align together to convey the intended meaning of advertisements. This strengthens the recent paradigm shift in discourse studies as visual images are now used together with texts to further make meaning lucid in advertising, exemplifying entrepreneurship discourse. Thus, language, by both the verbal and visual means, possesses variations and structures that grow the economy and represent some capitalist ideological inclinations of entrepreneurship discourse.