Interactive Meaning In Commercial Advertisements

Multimodal discourse refers to the new forms of discourse in which words, images,sounds, music and other semiotic resources are woven together to make meaning. Thetraditional boundaries between the use of language and other social semiotics tend tobecome increasingly blurred as they combine to interact. In recent years, the research ofmultimodality and multimodal discourse has been put in a very salient position at homeand abroad.Discourse analysis of advertising discourse used to focus on the analysis of verbaltexts. However, nowadays with the fast development of mass communication in ways ofmultimodal, as a major media discourse, advertisements adopt multimodal in designing aswell. This thesis is a multimodal discourse analysis of the interactive meaning incommercial advertisements. It attempts to explore the interactive meaning of commercialadvertisements to reveal how advertisements communicate with the viewers and influencetheir attitudes and behavior.Drawing upon Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar based on Halliday’sSystemic Functional Grammar, and Appraisal theory, the present study proposes amultimodal interactive working model as the analytical tool in attempt to provide a betterunderstanding of the interactive meaning of commercial advertisements. The wholeanalysis is carried out from two dimensions. At the dimension of visual images, the thesisexplores how the data constructs interactive meanings by applying contact, social distanceand attitude. At the dimension of image-verbiage relations, the thesis studies how thevisual the verbal modes contribute to integrative interactive meaning through the analysisof attitudinal meanings separately and cooperatively.Fruitful findings are derived from the analysis of the data. Firstly, in analysis of visualimages, commercial advertisements attract the public’s attention and convey informationwith contact, establish the social relationship between the producer of advertisements andthe viewer with social distance, affect the public’s attitude with perspective. Commercialadvertisements interact with the public and urge their behaviors by effectively applyingthese visual devices. Secondly, the analysis of multimodal commercial advertisements shows that there are two relations between image and verbiage in terms of Attitude. One isco-instantiation, in which image and verbiage are committed to attitudinal meaning whichcontributes to the interaction in the multimodal commercial advertisements. The other iscomplementarity, in which the image and verbiage complement each other in the absenceof some aspects indicating explicitly the attitudinal meaning. The image and verbiageinteract with each other in a complicated way to reinforce the same aspect form differentperspectives to achieve the best persuasive effects.To some degree, the present study has made certain contribution to enrichingmultimodal discourse analysis theoretically through constructing an integrativevisual-verbal intersemiotic framework for interactive meaning analysis, which furtherprovides convenience in exploring the interactive meaning between the visual images andverbal language in a more direct and clearer way. Practically, this thesis provides a newperspective for people to recognize the hidden ideology in the advertising discourse.