Removing Cultural and Language Barriers in European Fashion Advertising: the Multimodal Communication of Certainty

To date we know little about how fashion advertising breaks through cultural and language barriers to communicate certainly to its target audience. In order to gain further understanding regarding this issue, the present chapter focuses on fashion advertising and examines how its visual and verbal languages communicate certainty, and in some cases, persuasive uncertainty across languages and cultures. This study examines patters and structures of certainty in fashion advertising from a cross-fertilization of linguistic, solo-semiotic and psycholinguistic perspectives. It draws from a corpus comprised of all advertisements found in issues of Vogue sold in Italy, Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands from 2010 to 2013. The results of the study provide a significant contribution to our knowledge about how image and text in European fashion advertising strategically manage barriers to communicate certainty to the target readership.