A Social Semiotic Approach To The Multimodal Discourse Of Environmental Advertisements

Discourse analysis is a rapidly growing and evolving field.Since 1950s,studies in this field have arrested wide attention.Current researches involve a wide range of academic disciplines and topics.Included are explorations of micro and macro-level linguistic phenomenon such as those related to phonology,semantics and linguistic structures.But also included are different theoretical frameworks and methodological paradigms for the analysis of a variety of genres and diachronic studies of languages.However,with the development of science,technology and Internet,communication begins to include both language and also some other semiotic modes (such as sound,action,color,image,three-dimensional cartoons) to transmit information.This enriches the scope of expression systems in communication and manifests the multimodal nature of communication.Traditional discourse analysis is thus criticized for neglecting studies of these other semiotic resource systems.In light of this condition,a new paradigm for the analysis of discourses is formulated in 1990s,that is,multimodal discourse analysis by the social semiotic approach.Public service advertising is a kind of non-commercial advertising,which aims at making the public know serious social issues better,affecting their opinions and attitudes toward these issues,changing their behaviors and acts,and thus solving or tendering these social issues. Environmental protection and sustainable development,as an important social issue,is closely related to the public interests.Thus,we choose environmental advertisements(EAs) as our object of study.The data is collected from:(1) the website of China Public Service Advertisements;(2) the prize-winning works from the National Contest of Public Service Advertisements on Environmental Protection held in 2003;(3) public service advertising by foreign environment protection organizations as the Natural Resources Defense Council,the Nature Conservancy from their websites.The two advertisements in the case study part are "it's not my problem" ad from the American magazine Harper's Bazaar and a Chinese ad "Love of the earth" by Taibei Environment Protection Agency.Hence,this study attempts a social semiotic approach to the analysis of EAs as multimodal non-linear discourse which Kress and van Leeuwen has constructed,incorporating Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics,in hope of making a clarification on how image as a social semiotic resource and language as a social semiotic mode work together in an advertisement(ads) to generate synergy,create meaning and achieve the best persuasive effects,and meanwhile examining how EAs function as accelerators to improve the public environmental awareness and influence people's ideology.This paper has introduced the theoretical framework of the semiotic approach to multimodal discourse analysis and validated the appliability and practicality of this theory in interpreting ads, which provides a new paradigm for the analysis of advertising discourse domestically.And meanwhile,there has been little attention paid to the study of the relationship between various semiotic modes in the field of multimodal discourse analysis.Therefore,the exploration of the visual-verbal relations in EAs to some extent complements and develops this theory.