A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Road Traffic Signboards

We are now living in an era characterized by rapid changes in science and technology. Along with the fast development of digital technology, multimedia and Internet, the human discourses in the world exhibit more and more digital and multimodal features. Discourse has not been merely encoded by language, but also by other semiotic resources, such as image, movement, sound, diagram, color, layout etc. And the meaning-making process of a text is increasingly related to not only its verbal part but also its non-verbal resources and the intersemiotic complementarity. Thereby, multiliteracy must be taken into consideration.In the mid1990s, based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), Kress&van Leeuwen (1996) propose a useful grammatical framework for analyzing the visual images, which reciprocally, provides the theoretical bases and analytical methods for Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA). In recent years, theories on multimodality have been widely applied to analyzing the discourses of advertising, logo, webpage etc, however, the research on multimodal traffic signboards are seldom mentioned.Road traffic signboards, which are widely distributed in streets and lanes, play an important role in traffic security, and have close relation with our everyday life. Thereby, this thesis aims to explore the multimodal features of the genre of traffic signboards, its typical semiotic resources in construing metafunctional meanings and their working mechanism, which in turn, will not only apply the visual grammar to a broader scope and testify its plausibility and validity from practice, but also shed light on the development of multiliteracy of traffic signboards. Through fieldwork,60multimodal traffic signboards are collected for the corpus. The general analytical methodology is based on Halliday’s three meta-functional theory as well as Kress and van Leeuwen’s the grammar of visual design, which correspondingly, marks off our analysis into three parts. Each part includes two stages: Stage1, the discourse analysis, aiming to explore the typical linguistic realizations used in this genre by the quantitative analysis based on the meta-functional theory. Stage2, the multimodal discourse analysis, which employs both the quantitative and qualitative approaches, on the one hand, basically analyzes the corpus under the framework of visual grammar, on the other hand, makes some subtle modifications according to the specific genre features of traffic signboards. In terms of quantitative analysis, it aims to reveal the typical visual structures in this genre, and probe into the reason for the correspondences and differences between the linguistic realizations and visual realizations by the comparative analysis of the data obtained in Stage1and Stage2. In terms of qualitative analysis, it centers on the study of intra-semiosis and inter-semiosis of the typical sample texts from the corpus, especially looks deeper into the intersemiotic complementarity, namely how different semiotic modes are combined or coordinated to realize the meaning of the text. All in all, with respect to the history of multimodal discourse analysis in the social semiotic approach, Stage1lays the theoretical foundation for Stage2, and Stage2is the complement, the theoretical extension to Stage1, as it overcomes the inherent defects of discourse analysis in Stage1by presenting a finer and down-to-earth analysis.Based on the two stage analysis, the major findings include:Firstly, the verbal texts of traffic signboards are treated as a special variety of language in the realm of little text. By quantitative analysis of the corpus on the basis of Halliday’s meta-functional theory, we get an overview of the linguistic features of traffic signboards, which in turn, significantly enriches the researches of varieties of language, and especially is helpful to the description of the grammar of little texts.Secondly, the social reality, social relation as well as the organization of the text can be encoded by any semiotic resources. For the study of multimodality or intersemiosis, the products of the various modes should be analyzed in an integrated way, rather than as the sum total of the meanings of the parts. In the analysis of traffic signboards, we break down the disciplinary boundaries between the study of language and the study of image, and find that there always exists a synergistic relationship between the two modes.Thirdly, comparing the correspondences between linguistic and visual processes of our corpus with Kress and van Leeuwen’s corresponding model, we furthermore, discover the specific linguistic correspondences of visual symbolic process in the genre of traffic signboards and use them for this phenomenon in this thesis.Fourthly, in the genre of traffic signboards, social relations and social interactions are realized in relatively simply ways. In the light of the simpleness, we then make some modifications of Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar and build up a concise standard framework for the analysis of color saturation (one of the markers of modality values), which will be more applicable not only to the subvariety of traffic signboards, but also to a wide range of signboard-based genres.Fifthly, in the actual design of traffic signboards,"image above and words below" and "image on the left and words on the right" significantly take priority over other patterns of text-image distribution in number, which provides for visual grammar with the data support in practice that "image above and words below" and "image on the left and words on the right" are ideal patterns of distribution.Sixthly, we not only put forward two effective methods to classify the traffic signboards in the corpus (i.e. one is based on the source of the image, the other refers to the text-image position on the signboards), but also obtain the relevance between these two types of classification. In the signboards from Road Traffic Signs and Lines, the signboards with "image above and words below" and "image on the left and words on the right" are predominant in number, and others are only isolated instances. In the common road signboards, there are more with "image above and words below" and "image below and words above". Therefore, images on the upper part and on the left of the signboards are mostly taken from Road Traffic Signs and Lines, and those on the bottom and on the right of the signboards are mostly common images which have little to do with, or are indirectly related to, traffic directions, warnings and prohibitions. It fully shows the plausibility and validity of the theory of the grammar of visual design in traffic signboard design and enlightens us to take the different decoding processes and reading orders between the drivers and ordinary pedestrians into consideration when we design the traffic signboards, which, in turn, significantly gives some useful implications to the disciplined design of urban traffic signboards from the perspective of linguistics.To sum up, this thesis probes into the typical patterns of multimodal resources and their intersemiotic complementarity in construing the metafunctions of traffic signboards. It not only enriches the practice of MDA, but also gives some implications to the disciplined design of urban signboards from the perspective of linguistics.