Linguistic analysis of German, English and Turkish TV-commercials

Today texts are no longer seen as monomodal structures, which only include verbal messages, but as multimodal structures, that combine different semiotic codes such as language (written and/or spoken), image (still and/or moving), music (jingle and/or song and/or instrumental) and sound (natural and/or artificial). Therefore these structures are called multimodal texts in text linguistics and semiotics. Multimodal texts have a great potential for meaning making. TV-Commercials are considered as one of the most analyzed multimodal text types in these two fields. In text linguistics and semiotics TV-Commercials are defined as multimodal texts, which use verbal, visual and auditory resources to convince a specific target group of buying a specific product or service. The aim of this study is to analyze German, English and Turkish TV-Commercials with multimodal oriented approach. This study also presents the similarities and differences between these TV-Commercials, respectively multimodal texts, in these three different languages. The corpus is comprised of TV-Commercials of chocolate and chocolate containing products that are produced by German, American and Turkish brands. The analysis critera have been defined moving towards a multimodal oriented method, that is based on text linguistics and text semiotics. The analysis model consists of two levels which include text external and text internal criteria. The text external criteria contain advertising tool, sector, aim of advertising, target group, function and brand. The text internal criteria focus on the following modalities; language, image, music and sound as well as their submodalities and intermodal relations between them. All of the commercials which comprise the corpus of this study have been analyzed by using the mentioned criteria. The results of the analysis have been seperately presented for each language and comparatively interpreted by pointing out the similarities and differences between the three languages. The analysis of the text external structure of the researched commercials has indicated that there are many similarities based on advertising tool, sector, aim of advertising, function and brand between them. By the criterion target group it has been detected that analyzed turkish advertisements have a different audience when compared with German and English commercials. The results of the text internal criteria have shown that there are similarities between the analyzed commercials in three languages in the following submodalities; word types, visual items, color, light, camera range, camera angle and the modalities; music and sound. However it has been found out that two of these languages are more similar in terms of the usage rate of the modalities and the intermodal relations between them. According to the results of the analysis of the text internal criteria there are more similarities between the analyzed English and Turkish TV-Commercials. German advertisements on the other hand have an original characteristic.