Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of China 's Real Estate Print Advertisement

With the development of market economy and the improvement of people’s living standard, people’s demand for housing has become higher and higher. In this case, the real estate printed advertisements(REPA) begin its fast development. The great amount, easy access and strong continuity make the REPA become the primary choice for customers to achieve housing information. As a way of advertising products, the formation of REPA has changed from texts to the combination of texts and non-verbal forms(visual forms). In another words, the form of REPA evolved from monomodal form to multimodal form. In Chinese REPA, the utterance meanings are usually realized by the combination and interplay of textual information and visual images.Multimodal discourse is the new kind of text. It integrates words, sounds, images, printings or other symbolic resources together, in order to convey meaning. While multimodal discourse analysis(MDA) is the process of analysing several or all kinds of symbolic resources in texts or communication. This paper takes Chinese REPA as research objects, aiming to explore the process of making meanings of multimodal discourse and the interplay of different modes in Chinese REPA. This paper will take an comprehensive study of the characteristics of the meaning-making process on Chinese REPA and the rules of collocation of different modes under Chinese cultural contexts. From the research, we can find that in Chinese REPA, the main function of images is to reinforce the communication and persuasive force delivered by texts. The texts and images coordinate with each other, and integrate as whole discourse.