A Social Semiotic Approach To The Multimodal Discourse Of Obama's Presidential Campaign Posters

With the fast development of multimedia and computer technology, various semiotic phenomena appeared in human communicative activities are more and more prominent and the human discourse in the world has also shown digital and multimodal features. Discourse is not appeared by text, but also by audio, video,3D animation and other multimodal modes. Picture, animation, sound, graphics, color, layout and other multimodal means enrich the semantic form of expression and break the unity of the conventional media. The emerging multimodal discourse analysis has gradually become one of the hot linguistic researches. In 1990s, a new type of discourse analysis has been formulated, that is, multimodal discourse analysis by the social semiotic approach.Following the development of media, posters as a communicative means, become the most popular and effective advertising medium, visually propagandizing to the public through succinct art forms, strong color contrast, and other visual efforts, accompanying words. Political posters belong to social type, which with political ideas and establishing political images as the center, convey specific political ideologies. In 2008, Obama's campaign posters have published Obama's travel and campaign ideas and become an important window to display his image. Thus, this paper will adopt the qualitative research method which combines theoretical studies with the corpus analysis and will choose Obama's presidential campaign posters as the main analytic objects which have been selected from the major official websites.Hence, this study adopts a social semiotic approach to the analysis of Obama's campaign posters as the multimodal discourses from the perspective of visual grammar constructed by Kress and van Leeuwen, incorporating Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics, in hope of exploring social functions and meanings of language and image and other semiotic modes and making a clarification on how social semiotic modes work together in Obama's campaign posters to construct the whole meanings and achieve the best persuasive effects and propagandistic functions.This paper has validated the applicability and practicality of the theoretical framework of the semiotic approach to multimodal discourse analysis in interpreting posters and has enriched the dimensions of the study of posters. Thus, the author hopes that the exploration of the relationship between language and image is a complement and development of a multimodal discourse.