A Multimodal Analysis Of Website Homepages Of Financial Services Companies

Today,discourse has become more and more multimodalized,along with which multimodal discourse study has been performed in a wider range both at home and abroad.In light of multiple modes such as texts,images and color,etc.which are integrated into the website design of financial services companies,the thesis conducts a multimodal study on the website homepages of financial services companies from the developed country U.S.The study is carried out based on Visual Grammar proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen.The objects of this research are homepages of 38 financial services companies which rank top 500 in the 2016 Forbes Global 2000 list.Texts,images,color and image-text relationship are examined to find out how meanings are constructed through these modes on the homepages.Through an elaborate multimodal analysis of the homepages,the study shows that homepages of financial services companies,compared to those of other industries(e.g.E-commerce)have their own characteristics in meaning making.Specifically,imperative mood is most frequently used in the texts at clausal level,advising and encouraging customers’ involvement.In terms of modality,modal auxiliaries “can” with low modality value and “will” with medium modality value are more commonly used to express attitudes and achieve advertising effects without interfering customers’ decision making process for financial investment.Interactive meanings are mainly realized by the dominant use of offer images,medium shots and oblique angle images viewed from a horizontal angle,which not only allow the customers to obtain information but also help customers avoid interference resulting from the advertising effects when they make investment decisions.Regarding the construction of compositional meaning,left-right structure and top-bottom structure are combined in most of the homepages to provide abundant information about financial products and services.As to color schemes,blue,white and grey are mostly commonly found on the homepages,which conveys trustworthiness and professionalism in order to earn trust of customers.Complementary image-text relationship and image-subordinate-to-text relationship are most frequently used to provide as much information as possible so that customers can make a prudent investment decision.This study proves the feasibility of applying visual grammar to the multimodal study onthe website homepages of financial services companies.It also,to some extent,expands the fields of multimodal study,and renders a new perspective for the viewers to interpret the multimodal design and meaning making of the homepages of financial services companies.Therefore,this thesis contributesto the field of multimodal study in the financial industry.