Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Automobile Advertising Discourse

Discourse analysis has been widely researched since1950s. Studies in this field have beenused in the explorations of different kinds of discourses such as advertisements, dramas, filesof corporations and documents issued by governments. These researches lay importance onlinguistic phenomena such as phonology, semantics and linguistic structures. Among the manytheories of discourse analysis, Systemic Functional Grammar introduced by Halliday gets mostattention and is still widely applied to different studies. However, with the development ofscience, technology and internet, means of communication are not only realized by languagebut also other modes such as sound, image, color and cartoon. With the increasing usage ofnew communication modes, traditional discourse analysis, focusing on language only, is notenough for further exploration. Under such circumstances, multimodal discourse analysis isintroduced in the1990s. Linguists take Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar as a basis andpay attention to the study of other modes. Multimodal discourse analysis is a supply anddevelopment of traditional discourse analysis.Advertisements, a useful way to transmit information, play a major role in our daily lives.Among different types of advertisements, printed advertisements are the primary choice of aproducer for they are concise and explicit. One obvious characteristic of printed advertisementsis that they are multimodal discourses with lines, images, colors and so on. This paper choosesautomobile advertisements as subject for exploration since the amount of automobileadvertisements increases along with the increasing selling of automobiles. The data of thispaper are all taken from a famous car magazine, Auto Magazine. As pioneer in automobilemagazine, Auto Magazine provides readers with the latest news about cars and has the largestsales in China.With Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar as well as the Visual Grammar of Kress andvan Leeuwen, this paper attempts to explain how various modes work in automobileadvertisements to make meanings. This thesis includes five parts. The first part introducesbackground, sources, method and construction of the thesis. Next part is a literature review ofrelated theories involving Systemic Functional Grammar and Visual Grammar as well asadvertising. What follows the second part is the explanation of the theoretical framework of thethesis. Then is a detailed analysis of the data. Last, the fifth part, presents the findings based onformer exploration and some drawbacks of the thesis. According to the analysis of bothlanguage and images, the thesis testifies the applicability and effectiveness of adopting Visual Grammar and Systemic Functional Grammar in discourse analysis.