Semantic fields and implicit meanings in Harper’s Bazaar jewellery advertisements

The Harper’s Bazaar jewellery advertisements analyzed in this paper are formed by semantic fields, parts of which are only implied by the advertisements’ authors and have to be inferred by the viewers/readers. The viewers/readers have to fill in the gaps, in other words, which helps them understand the advertisements. The viewers/readers’ effort at trying to figure out the implicit meanings generates a certain amount of pleasure which keeps their attention focused on the ads, which may help with selling the products to which the semantic fields are related. In order to conceptualize the implicit meanings, the idea of gaps is adopted from reader-response theories. Semantic field relations are similar to cohesion ones, however, in contrast with a linear analysis of cohesion by means of lexical strings, a field-like non-linear perspective is used for representing semantic field relations. This is considered to be more appropriate for analyzing multimodal texts consisting of images and language. Several advertisements are analyzed in terms of semantic fields and it is specified how both the explicit and implicit meanings can be interpreted.