Strahinja Stepanov 521 UDC 81’42:766(497.11) 811.163.41’373.48:32 766:32(497.11) Strahinja Stepanov University of Novi Sad Faculty of Philosophy mUlTImODAl DISCOURSE ANAlYSIS OF SERBIAN ElECTION POSTER 1 Abstract: In recent years (political) sociology and linguistics have vested some interest into the research of political slogans. Even if these explorations led to a number of important insights and conclusions concerning the essence of slogans, this genre (type of text) still remains an object for further analysis. Though slogans are a kind of “primitive symbolic action” (McConnell 1971: 69), and (maximally) condensed and sublimated short texts, they still embody an amount of linguistic material worth investigating. Precisely because of their compressed and elliptic form (language data), slogans are convenient for “expressing” hidden (implicit) meanings. when we take into account a “material substrate” of a slogan, as for example on a billboard/hoarding or poster, and when we include other semiotic elements in the analysis, then implicit and explicit meanings become enriched or modified (via these other semiotic [visual/pictorial] codes) ‒ and discourse analysis, at the same time, becomes more complex and demanding. The corpus for this study consists of campaign posters used by one presidential candidate in the 2012 elections. This paper argues that a (political) poster ‒ containing a short text (=slogan + possibly some other textual inscription) ‒ relies obviously also on other semiotic code(s) leading to the pragmatic and semiotic enrichment of (complete or incomplete) proposition(s) expressed in a slogan. The analysis examines the interplay and interdependencies between these different codes on the poster and the outcome of this interaction for the overall political/communicative function of a political poster. Key words: (presidential) campaign poster, multimodal analysis, systemic-functional grammar 1. Posters and its place in the system of (pre-election) political communication 1.1. In order to pin down the genre of posters in the field of political communication, it would be quite useful to consider the rapport between the following text types and genres (regularly and superficially taken as synonyms or co-hyponyms): slogan, 1 This paper is part of an ongoing research project – Standard Serbian Language: Syntactic, Semantic and Pragmatic Research (178004) [Standardni srpski jezik: sintaksička, semantička i pragmatička istraživanja] – funded by The Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of Republic of Serbia.