Multimodalidade e o impacto das imagens nas advertências antitabagistas à luz da metafunção interativa da gramática do design visual

Abstract

Considering the active presence of a culture attached to the visual, there is a need to explore the new connotations expressed by texts that mix verbal and image content. Thus, it is necessary to find more effective ways to read multimodal texts. Therefore, this research aimed to discuss how multimodality contributes to the construction of meanings and, consequently, to the argumentativeness present in warning images of anti-smoking campaigns. Taking into consideration the main objective, the present dis-sertation work aimed to answer the following guiding questions: i) How does multimo-dality manifest itself in warning images of anti-smoking campaigns? ii) How do multi-modal relations interfere in argumentativeness and the construction of meanings? iii) How have the images been used by ANVISA to convince people to quit smoking throughout each group of campaigns? For this purpose, the theoretical framework that supported this study was based on the assumptions of Social Semiotics, considering the authors Hodge and Kress (1998) and on Multimodality, from the point of view of Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) and Kress (2010). With regard to the images of warn-ings, which focus on the consumer's disengagement regarding the practice of smoking, a bibliographic survey was carried out through websites and documents made availa-ble by health entities, such as the National Cancer Institute (INCA) and the National Health Surveillance Agency (Anvisa), and the corpus consisted of 12 images of warn-ings. For the analyses, the study used the authors Kress and van Leeuwen (2006), who proposed the Grammar of Visual Design. Among the metafunctions present in this grammar, we chose to bring to the analyses the Interactive Metafunction, since this part of the interaction established between the participants represented in the images and the reader, serving as an important tool to find out how the images of warnings are placed before the public. Thus, the conclusion reached by this scientific investiga-tion informs that multimodality is manifested in the images of warnings from the per-spective of the verbal, which represents the alerts issued by the Ministry of Health, and by the visual, through various images that bring the consequences generated from the use of cigarettes. It was also found that multimodal relationships interfere in the con-struction of meanings by the integration between the verbal and the imagery, which seek to convince the consumer/reader through complaceretion, the appeal to fear and piety through impactful counteradvertisements that seek to persuade the population not to consume the product. Throughout the campaigns, different strategies were being implemented to raise public awareness about the harmful effects of cigarettes with campaigns that came out of a more lenient line and began to adopt more dramatic and impactful images, an impact that has become increasingly magnified with images that appeal to a more aggressive and aversive character in order to provoke negative feel-ings and emoticons.