A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of PSA In A Perspective Of Semiotics

Public Service Advertisement(PSA) has been flourished in China in recentseveral years and also attracted a lot of attentions from the linguists both in china andsome foreign countries. In this paper, PDA also plays the most important role, for weuses some certain theories which has provided below to make a deep analysis on this.We all know the function of this sort of advertisement is to inform and alert the publicabout the issues existed today or to break out in not far future in the world such as theenvironmental pollution, short of resources and so on, so that ones who have seen itwill change their mind and do something to make the situation better.In order to makethis happen, one of the most significant feature is persuasiveness with its colorfulpictures and attractive words，or voices. That is why we make it as our study aim inthis paper. There are two purposes of this study, first we wants to broaden theapplication of the Visual Grammar proposed by Luween and Kress via using it to digout the internal connections in the discourse. Secondly, we want to prompt thereadability of the PSA and shed some highlights to the designer how to use thesemodalities perfectly in the process of the design.As a multimodal discourse(MD), advertisement is a real special, not onlybecause it includes words, colorful pictures and voices but they can co-exist.In thispaper, we applies the theory of the Function Grammar,added by the Visual Grammarby Luween and Kress.The data of this thesis comes from Public ServiceAdvertisement websites (http//www. gongyigg.cn and http//www.chinaadren. com).In spite of that,we also applies method of Case Study, in order to dig out the deepthe connection among these modalities.According to the results of this research, we can know that all the modalities existedin the Advertisements are not random, they follows some certain rules to worktogether to strengthen the meanings which wants to express, or these modalities workas inevitable partners to help the others to complete the meaning. All in all, they arearranged like some organization on purpose.By means of analyzing PSA by Visual Grammar and Function Grammar,we further find that these frames can also be applied to analyze these Public ServiceAdvertisements. On the other side, through this research, the readability of these sortsof advertisements can be improved, and the designers will also influenced by thislinguistic foundations.