Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Interactive Meaning In TV Public Service Advertisements

With the arrival of the digital and information era, the manner of information exchange has beenshifted from mono-modality to the multimodality. Multimodal discourse is the kind of discourse that usessemiotic resources like language, images, sounds, and actions to encode and construct meanings throughhuman’s sense organs such as seeing, hearing, tasting, and touching. In the field of discourse analysis,Multimodal Discourse Analysis comes into being and attracts more and more attention. Among manyschools of MDA, MDA of the social semiotic approach is the most developed one.On the basis of Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Linguistics, MDA of the social semiotic approachattempts to extend the three meta-functions (ideal function, interpersonal function and textual function) toMDA. Up to now, MDA of social semiotic approach is still at the initial stage, for much research justfocuses on the static image and a little research on the dynamic image. Taking it into consideration, thisthesis takes discourse of the dynamic public service advertising as the object for analysis and attempts toexplore the construction of the interactive meaning from the viewpoint of social semiotic approach.Based on Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar and by drawing on Appraisal Theory, the thesisoffers a synthetic framework for analysis of the interactive meaning in dynamic discourses. The primaryresearch method adopted in this thesis is qualitative method with the help of descriptive research. The dataanalysis is composed of three sections. The first one is concerned with the interacting meaning-construal inimages in terms of visual contact, social distance, perspective and modality; the second one analyzes howthe interactive meaning is realized in verbal language with respect to mood system and attitude system.The last part explores how the visual modes and the verbal modes cooperate to construct the interactivemeaning in PSA discourse. Then the study reaches a conclusion that various modalities work together torealize the interactive meaning and to persuade the public in advertising discourses.In short, the present study, in a sense, enriches the research of MDA and advertising discourseanalysis from a theoretical and a practical perspective. For instance, it illustrates interactingmeaning-construal of advertising discourse and proves the applicability of VG in dynamic discourse. Onthe other hand, there are some limitations in the hope of making further research.