Context-Dependent or Context-Detached? Multimodality in Commercials for Żubr Beer, A Case Study
Context-Dependent or Context-Detached? Multimodality in Commercials for Żubr Beer, A Case Study

Summary/Abstract: The paper offers a multimodal analysis of a selected instance taken from a series of commercials for Żubrbeer, an advertising campaign that has received wide acclaim among Polish audience in recent years. It seems that the success of the series resides in two aspects: firstly, by relegating the advertised product to a secondary place, the commercials for Żubrbeer do not activate alcohol-related issues in a straightforward way. Secondly, by assuming the form of ‘mini-narratives’ in the sense of Forceville (2009), they adopt various modes (visual, verbal and aural) which become “the cue to resolving the puzzling message of the ad” (Pérez-Sobrino 2017, p. 124). The way commercials for Żubrbeer are constructed inheres in the incongruity between what is offered in their visual and/or aural elements and the actual message encoded in the verbal mode, and depicted at the end of each commercial. An in-depth scrutiny shows that all commercials for Żubrbeer form a context-dependent Beer is wisent multimodal metaphor, with the visualized wisent as the secondary subject (Black 1979, Forceville 1996, also Fabiszak 2017), or the source in Lakoff and Johnson’s parlance (1980), and the hidden Beer as the primary subject, or the target.

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