Cognitive poetics of implicit pragmatic meaning in advertising discourse: intentionality, presuppositions, and interpretive mechanisms

Abstract

This article examines how implicit pragmatic meaning operates in contemporary advertising discourse and argues that it functions not as a peripheral stylistic effect, but as a central mechanism of persuasive design. Drawing on a corpus of advertising campaigns published between 2021 and 2025, the study develops an integrative analytical model that combines the pragmatic analysis of presupposition and implicature with the examination of intentionality, cognitive-poetic mechanisms, and multimodal organisation. The analysis shows that advertising does not simply transmit ready-made meanings; rather, it activates structured interpretive work by guiding the viewer through verbal compression, visual framing, perspectival control, and controlled under-specification. In this process, implicit meaning emerges through the coordinated interaction of image, text, layout, and culturally recognisable semiotic cues, which together shape inferential trajectories and regulate audience uptake. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which presuppositional framing, implicatural extension, conceptual metaphor, blending, framing, and viewpoint construction converge within single advertising cases and produce a layered persuasive effect. The findings demonstrate that implicitness in advertising is strategically organised and medium-sensitive: it depends on how verbal and visual resources are combined, how interpretation is paced, and how the recipient is positioned within the communicative act. The article contributes to multimodal pragmatics, cognitive poetics, and advertising discourse studies by offering a coherent framework for analysing concealed meaning structures and the mechanisms that make them persuasive. Its practical contribution lies in providing an analytical toolkit for examining brand communication, creative strategy, and the covert persuasive dynamics of digital media.