Metarepresentation and echo in online automobile advertising

The aim of this paper is to shed some light on the rhetorical import of echoing fashion in online automobile advertising within the framework of Relevance Theory. The study embraces the concepts of metarepresentation and echo and expands them beyond traditional relevance-theoretic limits (e.g., the analysis of irony, free indirect reporting or metalinguistic negation) to show how they can successfully explain that design-related passages of car advertising will achieve relevance via the addressee recognising the allusive nature of the ads, attributing them to some source and identifying the addresser's attitude towards them. Endorsing the view that advertising exemplifies covert communication, it is expected that linguistic metarepresentations will not be fully explicit but rather be left to the reader to infer.