INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR INNOVATIVE RESEARCH IN MULTIDISCIPLINARY FIELD

Abstract: John Searle, Oxford philosopher of language, asserts philosophy of language as a branch of philosophy of mind. The origin of his theory of intentionality lies in his work on ‘speech acts’. His theory of intentionality refers to the relationship between thoughts and the external world as he characterises intentionality in terms of the notion of mind. He integrated his theory of intentionality with his theory of perception. His theory of perceptual intentionality refers to mind’s capacity to be directed at or to be about something in the external world. In twenty first century communication, multimodality which entails multidisciplinarity is reality. Rapid and radical development in information technology gave birth to ‘new literacy’ revamping the relation between verbal and audio-visual with great upheaval in social semiotic landscape. Social semiotic multimodality encompasses various modes of communication such as speech, writing, images, digital visualization, music, sound, etc. representing the world as real. Kress and Van Leeuwen modelled metafunctions of visual communication such as representational, interactive and compositional on Hallidayan metafunctional approach to language. The compositional function of visual communication relates the representational and interactive meaning of images through the interrelated systems of information value, framing and salience. Dimensions of visual communication in product advertisements range from aesthetic, expressive, emotive and communicative to action motivator. It has unmediated psychological impact on customers with emotive immediacy and spurs them into the action of buying the product. The present paper examines triggering effect of perceptual intentionality in multimodal product advertisements in the light of John Searle’s theory of perceptual intentionality and Kress and Van Leeuwen’s grammar of visual communication. It analyses five specimen multimodal product advertisements by applying Kress and Van Leeuwen’s metafunctions of visual communication and underscores the triggering effect of perceptual intentionality as action motivator in multimodal product advertisements.