Arguing Against Corporate Claims Visually and Multimodally: The Genre of Subvertisements

In this paper, we describe the conditions under which the manipulation of the verbal and the visual elements or of the visual elements alone in the genre of subvertisements can be considered as an act of objecting or rebutting in an implicit argumentative discussion. We thus consider the cognitive and pragmatic aspects of communication while paying serious attention to the interaction of semiotic modes in order to analyse a number of images produced by anti-consumerist groups such as Adbusters. We identify four different ways in which image-text relations or the visuals alone can cue an incongruity between the message of the original ad and the message of the subvertisement in such a way that the latter functions as an objection or rebuttal of the claim advanced by the original advertisement.