A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Interactive Meaning Of Anti-War Posters

With the development and improvement of electronic information technology, the way in which people deliver and achieve information is beyond simple language and information begins to be transformed through kinds of multi media such as pictures, music, movies and so on. Accordingly, focus for the linguists to conduct research has been shifted from the means of language to various modes such as image and music, which belongs to multimodal discourse analysis.Posters have been studied in many fields as a kind of multimodal discourse. However, previous studies mainly focus on the aesthetic value but quite a few have touch upon its social function. Therefore, this study seeks to explore the anti-war posters from the perspective of their interpersonal meaning and confirm the feasibility of visual grammar in anti-war posters.To analyze interpersonal meaning of anti-war posters, the study is carried out from three aspects. In terms of the interpersonal meaning of image, Kress and van Lecuwan’s visual grammar is taken as the theoretical framework. The analysis is carried out from the aspects of visual contact and social distance between the represented and interactive participants, perspective and modality. Features of the four factors in anti-war posters as well as the realization of interpersonal meaning are discussed. In terms of the interactive meaning of the text, the analysis is carried out with reference to Halliday’s systematical functional grammar. The analysis is carried out from the aspects of mood, modality and person system. With Royce’s inter-semiotic complementarity, the inter-relation between the visual and verbal components is discussed. The cooperation and interaction between image and text in anti-war poster is explained in detail as well as the realization of the social function of anti-war posters.Data of this study are selected from famous domestic websites of public service poster such as China-designer.com and shijue.me.com; competitions of anti-war poster and international war oppose organizations. Five samples including both Chinese and English ones are analyzed in a detailed way. This study confirms the feasibility of visual grammar in analyzing both Chinese and English discourses and provides a new perspective for studying mullimodal discourse. It is expected that this study will be conductive to a better and more exaet understanding of anti-war posters.However, anti-war poster is just a special type of poster. Due to the limitation of the data, this study only confirms the applicability of visual grammar in anti-war posters. Whether it can be applied to posters of other themes and the other discourses which composed of visual and verbal modes still waits for more research in the future.