Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope: signs of time and space in advertising from the point of view of semiotics

Abstract

The topic of this article is the concept “chronotope”, created by the great Mikhail Bakhtin, and its use in advertising. This notion is one of the most important in the theory of literature. It also helps a lot of other sciences — theory of communication, applied psychology, psychoanalysis, theory of theatre and cinema, and particularly advertising, other marketing communications and marketing transmedia. The analysis of this concept is done from the standpoint of semiotics and its four parts — alphabetics, semantics, syntactics and pragmatics. The following chronotopes — Female and Male; Ordinary and Mythological; Central and Peripheral; Ordinary and Elevated; “Raw” and “Cooked” chronotopes — are examined in the first part of the article. The chronotopes are studied from the standpoints of semantic field and metaphors in the second part — semantics of chronotopes. The third part examines chronotopes as part of syntactics. The different chronotopes’ links (in the text; between the text and the context; and between the formal and content aspects of texts) are analyzed here. The theory of ad appeals and chronotopes is the topic in the fourth part of the article — pragmatics of chronotopes. The theory of ad appeals (the main psychological drive (motif) for the customers) is integral part of pragmatics. The reason is that the commodity (product) is one and the same, but the different consumers (women, men, with different attitudes, with different education, from different cultures — Russians, French, etc.) are attracted (appealed) to goods because of various emotional and rational reasons. That is why the admen communicate the goods in different ways for the numerous consumer groups and the ad specialists use dissimilar signs accordingly. Due to the volume of the article, only a small part of the big (huge) potential of this universal concept for advertising theory and practice is analysed here.