A Cognitive Study Of Appraisal Meanings In Verbal-visual Public Service Advertisement

The booming of business contributes gradually to people’s living standard, whilethere also arise a series of social problems such as the natural ecological imbalance, thecorruption in morality and ethics. Hence, public service advertisement (PSA) is neededto call for people’s attention to these problems. In that case, the study of PSA is oftremendous social significance. With appraisal theory and multimodal metaphor as thetheoretical foundation, this study targets to find the features of cognitive appraisal inverbiages and images in PSA. To encode the appraisal meanings in PSA of love appeal,fear appeal and satisfaction appeal, the method of multimodal discourse analysis (MDA)is employed, with which the cognitive mechanism for the interaction of verbiages andimages are elaborated.It is found that in the three types of PSA, affect accounts for the most importantpart of attitudinal value while that of judgment and engagement values is second to it.The distribution of specific values varies with different types of PSA. In PSA of loveappeal, happiness and satisfaction under the subsystem of affect is most frequently usedby ads producer to provoke readers’ love by displaying beautiful scenes. Positivecapability in judgment is most frequently utilized to affirm readers’ ability and win theirtrust. Thus immediate actions are provoked. With regard to engagement resources,expansion is preferred to show respect for readers. In PSA of fear appeal, insecurity anddissatisfaction within the subsystem of affect are most frequently employed to preventinappropriate behaviors by imposing pressure on readers through terrible images.Within the subsystem of judgment, negative propriety is most frequently taken toexpress ads producers’ disapproval and condemnation of inappropriate behaviors.Contraction in engagement is preferred to directly reject readers’ improper opinions and behaviors. In PSA of satisfaction appeal, happiness and satisfaction under thesubsystem of affect are most frequently applied. Images in PSA of this type unfoldsocial reality objectively to readers, who are left alone to make judgments. Negativepropriety within judgment is most frequently adopted to express ads producers’disapproval. Disclaim in engagement is frequently utilized. In addition, almost allgraduation values employed in the three types of PSA are “raise” values. Ads producerstake advantage of this linguistic strategy to strengthen their own persuasive attitudes.In this thesis, it is also observed that in the construal of multimodal metaphor andappraisal meanings, the verbiage-image relation can be either integrating orcomplementary. In integrating PSA, verbiages and images can be separated forinterpretation. As the interpretation of images is non-directional, verbiages serve toanchor the meaning of images. Thus the theme of images is highlighted. Incomplementary PSA, verbiages and images complement and reinforce each othermetaphorically to construct appraisal meanings. By the display of concrete entities andscenes, images can elaborate and saturate verbal information. Ultimately, comparedwith verbiages, images are more powerful to encode appraisal meanings.In this way, this study tries to promote the communication between PSA readersand ads producers by providing references for them. And ads producers can make use ofthe appraisal nature to create more effective PSA.