A Comparative Analysis Of Interpersonal Meaning In Chinese And English Anti-Smoking Public Service Advertisements From Multimodal Perspective

Deconstruction of the meaning from multimodal perspective has broken a new path for achieving the most apposite meaning of a text.Multimodal discourse analysis(MDA)which covers a wide range of areas,such as advertisements,gestures,movies,etc.,attracts an increasing number of domestic researchers.Meanwhile various non-verbal semiotics in digital era,such as images,sound,etc.,have provided broad prospect and chance for the development of MDA,so discourse analysis has gradually evolved from traditional linguistic analysis to modern multimodal discourse analysis,under which language is conceived merely as one of the meaning expression tools.Besides,advertisement,as the typical carrier of multimodality,has been a heated topic in recent years.While it seems that researchers tend to focus on commercial ads,and the public interest-oriented non-commercial ads,such as the anti-smoking public service advertisements have been neglected all over the years.Thus,based Halliday’s Interpersonal Metafunction,Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Interactive Meanging,and Royce’s Intersemiotic Complementarity theory,this thesis made a comparative analysis of 100 English and Chinese anti-smoking public service advertisements by using both quantitative and qualitative methods,which is to find the distinctive features,as well as the similarities and differences between Chinese and English anti-smoking advertisements in constructing interpersonal meaning,including the comparative analysis of verbal mode,namely mood,person and modality,and visual mode,such as attitude,perspective,social distance and modality.Nevertheless the relationship between the visual and verbal modes in Chinese and English anti-smoking public service advertising(PSA)is also discussed.It is found that both Chinese and English anti-smoking advertisements share some similarities,but they also carry their own distinctive features.When it comes to the verbal mode,both of them prefer declarative mood and the second person pronouns.They seldom use modal operators,among which low value modal operators are preferred to make the communication negotiable.Despite the similarities,Chinese and English anti-smoking advertisements show obvious difference in the choice of the first person pronouns.Chinese anti-smoking ads prefer the plural form“我们(we,our,or us)”,while the English ads favor the singular form“I”and“me”.For the visual mode,they show great uniformity in depictingthe represented participants from frontal angle and at eye level.Though both of the Chinese and English advertisements frequently use‘offer’images,they differs from each other by applying different types of participants.Besides,Chinese anti-smoking advertisements often use medium social distance to depict the represented participants,while the English prefer depicting objects from close distance.Considering that the meaning of these multimodal ads is achieved through visual-verbal cooperation,rather than a simple superposition,the present study also analyzed visual-verbal relationship,finding that both Chinese and English anti-smoking ads favor the reinforcement of address and attitudinal dissonance.It is hoped that this thesis will increase reader’s understanding about multimodal anti-smoking ads and awareness of the distinctive features in Chinese and English ads,detecting the hidden factors in constructing interpersonal meaning.At the same time,it may also give positive guidance to advertisers on the ways and strategies of producing ads.