Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Chinese And American Real Estate Advertisements

At present, there are a great number of well-designed and influential real estate (RE) advertisements in domestic newspapers. In America, RE advertisements also take up a certain amount of space in newspapers. The delicately designed Chinese and American RE advertisements exert great impact on people's consumption ideology and values and simultaneously reflect consumers'dissimilar appeals in different contexts of economic situation, institutional mechanism and culture. Under the influence of financial crisis, the advertising agent needs to have a better comprehension of meaning construction processes of textual, visual and other resources; consumers also have the necessity to improve their multimodal discourse literacy so as to better distinguish the advertised houses. In a word, a multimodal discourse analysis of RE advertisements has great research value and realistic significance.This research chooses RE advertisements on Southern Metropolitan Paper and New York Times as its data sources to construct a multimodal corpus of Chinese and American RE advertisements. From the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis, adopting a combined methodology of quantitative & qualitative study and micro-analysis & macro-analysis, this study makes a comparative analysis of meaning-making processes of Chinese and American RE advertisements by employing theories of appraisal theory, genre analysis and visual grammar. The research objective is to improve readers'multimodal discourse literacy by informing them of meaning-making processes of language and images as social symbols through an analysis of textual resources, visual elements and interplay between the two categories of resources. In addition, the study also rationalizes the similarities and differences in Chinese and American RE advertisements from the aspects of economic situation, institutional mechanism and cultural orientations.In textual analysis, the research employs several concepts of appraisal theory and genre analysis respectively to analyze the appraisal resources on lexical level and discourse structuring of these advertisements. On lexical level, practical values of a house, symbolic values of a house and appraisal lexis are discussed. Based on data retrieved with Antconc 3.2.1, the following findings can be gotten:â‘ Both countries'RE advertisements give detailed description of house layout and facilities and stress the convenience of living in the house.â‘¡The differences lie in that Chinese RE advertisements make much greater efforts on demonstrating the natural environment of the house than American ones, and symbolic values of houses and appraisal lexis are much more frequently and widely referred to in Chinese RE advertisements than in English counterparts to indicate values of a house. On discourse structuring, the proposed move-step structures of both countries'advertisements are similar. The differences lie in that Move 3 (Justify the house) is only used in Chinese RE advertisements and Move 6 (Offering Incentives) and Move 9 (Escaping responsibilities) are more frequently employed in Chinese RE advertisements than American counterparts.Visual analysis is undertaken from the perspective of interactive meanings in visual grammar, and interactive resources adopted prominently in these advertisements, including contact, social distance and attitude, are explicitly explored. The findings are listed as follows:â‘ 'Offer'images take a major percentage in both Chinese and American RE advertisements.â‘¡Social relation is often established in Chinese RE advertisements whereas intimate relation is often established in American RE advertisements.â‘¢From the horizontal angle, most of Chinese RE advertisements are'involvement'advertisements (67%), whereas, American RE advertisements (79%) are mostly'detachment'advertisements. From the vertical angle, a large percentage of Chinese RE advertisements are'viewer power'advertisements (53%), but American RE advertisements are most possibly'equality'advertisements (43%). Additionally, the intersemiotic relations between the verbal and visual modes are concluded: reinforcement and complimentarity. Thereinto, reinforcement is mainly realized through intersemiotic repetition, intersemiotic hyponymy and intersemiotic meronymy. It concludes that visual images can reinforce and supplement the communicative and persuasive power conveyed by verbal texts and vise versa. In a word, the textual and visual resources in these advertisements can coordinate in the process of making meanings and integrate into a multimodal whole.Subsequently, the similarities and differences in Chinese and American RE advertisements are rationalized from the aspects of economic situation, institutional mechanism and cultural orientations. It can be shown that the design of both countries'RE advertisements is confined and even determined by its economic, institutional and cultural context. Only those RE advertisements fit for a country's economic, institutional and cultural context can attract the customers'attention and achieve the informative and persuasive purposes. It is hoped that this research can be of great help in informing readers of the meaning-making process of these semiotic resources and improving readers'multimodal discourse literacy. Additionally, it can give RE advertisements producers some hints on designing more persuasive RE advertisements.