A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Public Service Advertising In China Daily

Public service advertising is a special branch in advertisements.It has growing influence towards the society and people's lives.Compared with the research conducted in the commercial advertising sphere,public service advertising falls behind for two reasons:on the one hand,it has a relatively shorter history and less social recognition than commercial advertisements;on the other hand,the initiators are different.Public service advertising is usually sponsored by non-profit organizations or government offices who intend to advocate an idea or a concern.It is for the public and for the society.While commercial advertisements are created by corporations or other entities who want to sell a product or a kind of service.The guiding principle is---selling more and making more profit.Research findings of the western scholars reveal that different ways of message transmission may exert different influences.Most analysis of public service advertising takes sociological perspective in categorizing and evaluating it.Grounded on social practices,critical discourse analysis takes an incisive and comprehensive view towards discourse,which puts more emphasis on utility.This thesis put forward several questions to facilitate the research process:how forms and meanings interplay,how image and text interrelated and if appeal analysis complements composition analysis in making a joint effort in the understanding of public service advertising.To answer those questions,the author chooses public service advertisings(76 in total)from China Daily in the first half year in 2008 as the research data.This thesis includes five chapters,the organization is as follows:Chapter One briefly introduces the inspiration and aims of the thesis,the reason of using critical discourse analysis in public service advertising study,the guiding principle of the thesis---critical language awareness,as well as the organization of this research.Chapter Two is the literature review.First,the author compares public service advertising with other forms of advertisings.Then it comes to the research review of critical discourse analysis in advertising discourse.Chapter Three discusses the research framework and data collection.The composition analysis by Gunther Kress and message appeals are referred.Composition analysis attempts to deconstruct the visual design,to make explicit how the available resources of visual grammar from a potential for the representational and communication of meaning through spatial configurations of visual elements.Appeal analysis,on the other hand,pays more attention to social forces.The author also provides some data information,such as,usage reasons,resources and scale.Chapter Four is the main body.Using composition analysis and appeal analysis, the author discusses how society and those samples shape each other.According to the research findings,composition analysis is a well rounded way by decoding and reconstructing the meaning of public service advertising.But it cannot deal with every data.As to the appeal analysis,it can be applied to all the samples.The widely used social norms successfully educate the public.Chapter Five is the conclusion,including the summary of the thesis,limitations of the current study and possibilities of further research.By analyzing the public service advertisings in China Daily from January to June in 2008,the author hopes to uncover how public service advertising transmits its message and the effects of such transmission.Knowing these features will enhance the knowledge of public service advertising creators and sponsors,which in turn benefits the messages sending and receiving process after all.Limited by the data and the research extent of this paper,further investigation on the basis of a fuller data is necessary.In that case,audience analysis and power analysis are explanatory means too.Henceforth,it will become one of the main fields in the author's future exploring.