The Multimodal Discourse Analysis On Luxury Advertisements

With the development of digital media,traditional graphic advertising can no longer meet the needs of advertisers and audiences,and multimodal advertising is warmly welcomed by people.Meanwhile,the luxury industry has become a fast-growing field,and its advertisement has played an important role in this process.Yet few people have paid attention to explore the multimodal features of luxury advertisements and the way they convey meaning.Therefore,from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis,this study analyzes three modalities of luxury advertisement respectively,which not only helps advertisers and viewers to better understand multimodal advertisements,but also enriches the application of multimodal discourse analysis in the field of advertising.This study is based on the multimodal discourse analysis and uses two language analysis tools Ant Con C and ELAN to analyze the verbal,image,and color modality of luxury advertisements and to discover the ideational,interpersonal/interactive,and textual meaning of those three modalities.The results show that: First,in the verbal modality,luxury advertisements are prone to use nouns,adjectives and adverbs.Nouns have a clear ideographic function,while adjectives and adverbs mainly undertake the function of modification.And luxury advertisements prefer to use sentences with modal verbs and passive voice,which are more objective and can speakers’ mood can be expressed.The features of verbal modality are using the content words and sentences with passive voice and modal verbs.And its ideational and interpersonal meaning are embodied through these features.Second,the image modality in the advertisements mostly use the offer shots of product displaying to provide detailed information.Besides,the frequent use of close-up shots and the interchangeable use of the high and low angles have narrowed the psychological distance between advertisers and the audiences,which provides a communication path between the advertisers and audiences.Accordingly,the interactive meaning of the image modality is realized.Third,in color modality,luxury advertisements use the symbolic meaning of the color per se to reflect the ideational meaning.Then,luxury advertisements tend to manipulate the color scheme to form a simple and concise style or to reduce the degree of luxuriousness and expensiveness of their products,which can make luxury products more touchable and accessible.Accordingly,the interpersonal meaning of color modality is delivered.Moreover,luxury advertisers pay attention to the color unity in the entire advertisement.It can improve the recognition of the brand through color coordination to achieve the textual meaning of the color modality.To sum up,this study not only verifies the feasibility of multimodal discourse analysis by enriching the application of multimodal discourse analysis in the field of luxury advertising,but also helps to improve the multimodal understanding ability of advertisers and audiences.