A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of English Print Public Service Advertisements

With the fast advancement of technology and extensive use of internet,multimodality has become an integrate part of everyday life in the world. Informationis being communicated not only through the mono-modal text but also the multimodaltext such as image, sound and color. Thus inevitably the research on the multimodaldiscourse has become a trend. As an effective vehicle to broadcast social values andserve the public, public service advertisements aim to advocate good ideas, carryforward the fine social morals and promote social progress. Therefore, to make afurther study of the English public service advertisements from a multimodaldiscourse analysis perspective is still of theoretical and practical significance.The core concept of Halliday’s functional grammar states that language as asocial symbol has three meta-functions to represent the world and reflect interpersonalrelationship. Drawing on systemic functional grammar, Kress and van Leeuwen (1996)proposed a framework for visual analysis which interprets advertisements in terms ofits representational, interactive and compositional-meanings. This approach tomultimodal discourse provides us a powerful toolkit to account for meanings arisingfrom images and the integrated use of the visual and verbal sources in print media.In the thesis, an analysis of forty examples is given to test the applicability ofvisual grammar to print public service advertisements. And all these ads are analyzedfrom the perspective of three meta-functions within each mode according to visualgrammar. The findings of this thesis are expected to be of help in better understandingpublic service advertisements and in better designs of them, so as to promote theinfluence of public service advertisements.