A Multimodal Contrastive Analysis Of The Interactive Meaning In Chinese And English Public Service Advertisements

With the rapid development of multimedia technology, people tend to usedifferent ways to communicate with each other and multimodal discourse has beenemployed frequently to convey information and construct meaning. At the same time,advertising discourse has also been involved in the multimodal trend ofcommunication. Under such circumstances, traditional approaches to studyadvertising language seem unable to meet the need of multimodal interpretation of theadvertising discourse any more.This research made a contrastive analysis of the interactive meaning in Chineseand English public service advertisements (hereafter as PSA) from a multimodalperspective. On the basis of finding out similarities and differences between Chinesemultimodal public service advertisements (hereafter as CPSA) and Englishmultimodal public service advertisements (hereafter as EPSA), the present thesisprobed into the following questions:1How is the interactive meaning realized in the visual mode in Chinese andEnglish PSAs? Are there any differences and similarities?2How is the interactive meaning realized in the verbal mode in Chinese andEnglish PSAs? Are there any differences and similarities?All the research data were collected from authoritative magazines and officialwebsites of philanthropic organizations. In order to obtain a valid contrastive result,all the CPSAs and EPSAs were selected of the same theme.50CPSAs were chosenfrom Chinese magazine Southern Weekend and website China’s Public ServiceAdverting Network;50EPSAs were chosen from English magazine Time and theofficial website of World Wildlife Fund. In addition, based on Halliday’s FunctionalGrammar as well as Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar, a modifiedframework to analyze the interpersonal meaning in PSAs was presented. This thesisadopted a quantitative, qualitative and contrastive research for analysis.According to the quantitative analysis, the frequencies of principles in visualgrammar and systematic functional grammar have been concluded and analyzed. Andthe contrastive analysis aimed at finding out the similarities and differences betweenCPSAs and EPSAs. As for the qualitative study of analysis, the present thesis made anelaborate illustration of how the interactive meanings are realized in both visual and verbal modes.First the analysis was conducted from the visual modes--the visual images inadvertisements. The present thesis analyzed how interactive meaning is constructed interms of contact, social distance and perspective and made a contrastive analysis tofind out the differences and similarities between CPSAs and EPSAs.Next, the analysis on the interactive meaning was conducted from the verbalmodes--the advertising language. The present thesis analyzed how interactivemeaning is realized in light of mood, modality and person system and made acontrastive analysis to find out the similar and different points between CPSAs andEPSAs.Through the contrastive analysis, major findings are listed as below:First of all, from the visual mode: interactive meaning in images is constructedthrough contact, social distance, and angle. CPSAs tend to use “offer” acts, long shot,oblique angle and eye-to-eye perspective to construct interactive meaning. Althoughthe majority of EPSAs also adopt “offer” acts, the employ of “demand” acts is morethan that in CPSAs, and EPSAs prefer to use close-up shot, frontal angle andeye-to-eye perspective to construct interactive meaning.Second, from the verbal mode: mood, modality and person system can be used toconstruct interactive meaning. The similarities lie in that declarative mood is widelyused in both CPSAs and EPSAs. However, in light of modality, CPSAs adopt morelow value modal operators, while EPSAs use more high value modal elements.Besides, the use of person system in EPSAs is much frequent than that in CPSAs; andChinese second person has two forms,“你” and “您”, the latter one is used to showpoliteness and respect; while in English, there is just one counterpart “you”.The significance of this research can be summarized from both theoretical andpractical perspectives. As this thesis aims to find out the similarities and differences ofthe interactive meaning-making between CPSAs and EPSAs, it can enrich themultimodal discourse analysis theoretically and provide a new study perspective inthis field. Besides, the proposed framework for the analysis of interactive meaning inPSAs may make great contribution to future studies. Last, the present thesis can alsoprovide a useful reference for the design and appreciation of PSAs.