| Multimodality is the new term widely discussed by linguistics in recent years in the socialsemiotic circles of western countries. It refers to the combination of different semiotic modesof various communicative events. Different from the traditional discourse analysis, multimodaldiscourse analysis is the analysis of different semiotic modes including language, sound, colorand action in the images, paying more attention to analyzing the synthetical coordination ofboth the dynamic and static resources. However, traditional discourse analysis has emphasizedon studying the verbal meaning of language, the visual and dynamic ones in images have notdone enough as we have done on language.Since the concentration on literal meaning of language is not enough in comprehendingsocial communications. Multimodal discourse analysis has become the trend which coverswide fields of discourse analysis. The fifteen images of environmental public serviceadvertisements have been collected for analysis including five themes such as climate change,economize energy, extinct animals, water resources and forest resources. All of these fivethemes of images aim at arousing people's echoes on various environment problems andhelping our serious living planet escape from dilemma. As the species of public serviceadvertisement, the environmental public service advertisement has been adopted as the objectto spread social responsibilities to people with highly popular trend. It also has been concernedfor its particularly visual shock of images.This study adopts qualitative and quantitative research for analysis. According to thequalitative study of analysis, the interactive meaning between the represented and interactiveparticipants has produced by the combination of visual and verbal modes of images. As for thequantitative study of analysis, the frequencies of principles in visual grammar and systematicfunctional grammar have been concluded and analyzed.In this study, fifteen images are all English environmental public service advertisementsand composed of visual images and verbal texts. The research has studied both the verbal andvisual parts in terms of Kress (2006) and Halliday's (1994) theoretical basis respectively. Based on Kress and Van Leeuwen's (2006) statements of visual grammar, the various species ofenvironmental public service advertisements were studied in the light of contact, socialdistance and perspective to achieve the interactive meaning. By analyzing the visual ones, thecontact has produced by the information value of demand and offer. The social distance hasexpressed through the size of frame. The perspective has represented in terms of horizontal andvertical angle. The interpersonal meaning of verbal texts of fifteen samples was explained bymood, modality and person system. By analyzing the verbal ones, the declarative andimperative mood have been considered as the main ways adopted in environmental publicservice advertisements which also occupied the large scales in the study. As for the modality,the low and medium degrees have used to persuade addressees to get aware of environmentalproblems for the sake of the particular features of environmental public service advertisement.The first and second personal pronouns of person system have been put to use to influence theaudience's attitudes and actions. Under such circumstances, the visual images and verbal textsin collected environmental public service advertisements can be cooperated and coordinatedwith each other to actualize the most effective influences on people's attitudes and behaviors ofpublic benefits and social responsibilities. |
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