Study On Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Advertisements In Visual Surroundings

With the development of technology and mass-media, the dominance oflanguage is weakened and visual communication helps to deliver meaning inmultimodal discourses. The traditional discourse analysis based on language is notenough now. New grammar is called by the new era in order to show the integratedmeaning forming by various semiotics. Multimodal discourse analysis sprang up in1990s and it was based on Halliday’s systemic functional grammar. Kress and vanLeeuwen propose visual grammar derived from the systemic functional grammar.Based on ideational meaning, interpersonal meaning, and textual meaning, theypropose representational meaning, interactive meaning, and compositional meaning.The print business advertisements have aroused the interests of many linguistsand scholars. Before the flourishing of multimodal discourse analysis, the analyses ofadvertisements are based on language analysis, such as cohesion and coherence,speech acts and so on. In this thesis, the author analyzes print business advertisementswith the framework of Kress and van Leeuwen----the visual grammar. Multimodaldiscourse analysis includes many semiotics, such as sound, image, and gesture. In thisthesis the researcher is done based on visual surroundings. That is to say the wholeanalysis is about image. In the thesis, the framework of visual grammar is introduced,and several advertisements are analyzed according to Kress and van Leeuwen’s theory.And a quantitative investigation shows the favorite and the least favoriteadvertisement. Then the research shows the reason of the investigator’s choice, thedifferences between the better and the worse advertisements indicating the factors thatinfluence the preference of the advertisements. The research is aiming to answer thesequestions: How is the integrated meaning constructed through image in printedbusiness advertisements from the perspective of representational, interactive, andcompositional meaning? What are the factors that affect the meaning delivery ofadvertisement through multimodal discourse analysis of advertisement? Why does aconsumer like an advertisement or dislike an advertisement? How do we make theadvertisements more understandable and memorable by viewers?The study illustrates the effectiveness of applying visual grammar toadvertisement discourse analysis. And the differences between this study and other multimodal discourse analysis are the combination of quantitative and qualitativeanalysis. The former researches are pure qualitative analyses which are notconvincible enough. Through the contrast between students’ favorite and least favoriteadvertisements, some affecting factors are found from the perspectives of threemetafunctions. For instance, the actor and goal, reactor and phenomenon, carrier andattributes affect the representational meaning in image analysis. The circumstance ofthe advertisements offers a background scene to the viewers.The researcher finds that viewer’s interests to the advertisements influences thememory of the brand of the advertisement. Therefore the advertisement producersshould make their advertisements more favorable to the viewers in order to makethem remember their products. In today’s society, no single semiotic systempredominates the others. The delivery of meaning is contextualized in specificcontexts through the integration of many semiotic systems which include thelinguistic and the visual. But due to the personal capacity, the analysis is notcomprehensive enough. The latter can still find the treasure of multimodal discourseanalysis in the future study which combines the sound, image and words together.