A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Pro-environmental Public Service Advertisements

With the rapid development of digitalization and technology, a series of non-verbalsemiotic resources such as image, color, typography and sound, plays a significant role inreal-life communication and mass media. Therefore, social interaction and discourse formsare characterized by multimodality. As we all know, verbal texts dominate the traditionaldiscourse analysis. However, nowadays, information is no longer restricted to the verbaltexts alone. In fact, static images, dynamic videos, three-dimensional cartoons, etc. havegone beyond language and enriched the expression of meanings. Therefore, multimodaldiscourse analysis came into being. Nowadays, environmental protection and sustainabledevelopment are the two issues which have aroused the concern to the internationalcommunity. Pro-environmental public service advertisements (pro-environmental PSAs)may help to improve the citizens’ morality, behavioral conventions and ideologies, thuscontributing to the solution of the environmental problems.G. Kress and T. van Leeuwen (2006) construct Visual Grammar for analyzing images,on the basis of M. A. K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar. The present thesis,based on Visual Grammar, aims at making a multimodal analysis of the pro-environmentalPSAs from the perspectives of the representational meaning, the interactive meaning andthe compositional meaning through theoretical exploration and demonstration analysis byemploying both qualitative and quantitative methods. In addition, this thesis is acorpus-based study on PSAs, and the data are mainly selected from World Wide Fund(WWF) and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). It attempts to analyze imagesand explores how the representational meaning, the interactive meaning and thecompositional meaning are constructed in pro-environmental PSAs. The present studyshows that Visual Grammar is helpful in interpreting images in pro-environmental PSAsand the images possess the characteristics of systematicness and functionality; that anarrative process is frequently adopted to convey the representational meaning inpro-environmental PSAs; that visual contact, social distance and attitude correspond with each other to produce the interactive meaning of the images; and that the compositionalmeaning is realized through three compositional principles: information value, salience andframing, which are correlated in essence, but not always co-existential.This thesis enriches the research of advertising discourse analysis and provides a newapproach to interpreting pro-environmental PSAs, which may help improve the viewers’ability to analyze images.