A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Social Civilization Advertisements

Discourse analysis is a rapidly growing and evolving field. Since1950s, studies in this field have arrested wide attention. It has been largely restricted to verbal language at the early stage. Other meaning-making semiotic modalities such as images, sounds and colors are relatively ignored. Multimodal discourse analysis, which started in the90s of the last century, may help people to understand the meaning of multimodal texts.Social civilization advertisement is a kind of non-commercial advertising, which aims at making the public know serious social issues better, affecting their opinions and attitudes toward these issues, changing their behaviors and acts, and thus solving or tendering these social issues. Social civilization is closely related to the public interests. Thus, we choose social civilization advertisements as subject of study. The data are collected from:(1) SCAs issued on the website such as the website of China Public Service Advertisements (http://www.pad.gov.cn/) and the website of PSA (http://www.gongyigg.cn);(2) SCAs issued by international and national organizations such as WWF. And the advertisement in the case study "BED" is from public service advertisement website and is about the homeless.This thesis attempts a social semiotic approach to the analysis of social civilization advertisements on the theoretical basis of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics and Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar, in hope of making a clarification on how image as a social semiotic resource and language as a social semiotic mode work together in an advertisement to generate synergy, create meaning and achieve the persuasive effects, and meanwhile examining how social civilization advertisements function as accelerators to improve the public social civilization awareness and influence people’s ideology.This thesis validates the applicability and practicality of the theoretical framework of the multimodal discourse analysis, which provides a new paradigm for the analysis of visual-verbal relations in advertisements to some extent complements.