Media-semantic Analysis of Christian Motifs on German Web Portals for Advertising: Aspect of Decoding Narrative News and Images

Authors

  • Mirela Müller

    Department of German Language and Literature, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split, Split 21000, Croatia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.30564/fls.v6i3.6687
Received: 24 May 2024 | Revised: 17 June 2024 | Accepted: 28 June 2024 | Published Online: 20 July 2024

Abstract

Religious elements belong to effective and expressive creative means and are often used on web portals in advertising. On the one hand, they attract attention and contribute to the aesthetics of advertising. On the other hand, they fulfill different functions analyzed media-semantically in this paper. Experts in educational and linguistic sciences warn that incomplete media-semantic analysis and reinterpretation of religious symbols and narrative news in the media can undermine religious beliefs. The work aimed to determine how religious elements are verbalized and visualized in advertising. Analysis of Christian motifs on German web portals for advertising was carried out in the period from November 2022 to February 2023. 112 analyzed samples that included Christian themes were processed. The research monitoring matrix included different forms of linguistic and religious elements. The paper concludes that religious lexical elements in advertising have an ambivalent role and that the media support the Church’s secularization process.

Keywords:

religious vocabulary; Christian motifs; monitoring; decoding; forms of advertising; Doekler's model

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How to Cite

Müller, M. (2024). Media-semantic Analysis of Christian Motifs on German Web Portals for Advertising: Aspect of Decoding Narrative News and Images. Forum for Linguistic Studies, 6(3), 543–557. https://doi.org/10.30564/fls.v6i3.6687

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