A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Interactive Meaning In Public Service Advertisements

Entering the image era, multimedia and internet have developed so fast. Message is not only expressed through text, different semiotics, like pictures, sounds etc. play a more and more important role in constructing meanings. Meaning is conveyed through the interaction between semiotics. Therefore, pure language analysis cannot manifest the meaning fully, the attention must be turned into multimodal discourse analysis. In other words, multimodal discourse analysis enlarges the discourse research. Public service advertisements aim to arouse public’s awareness of social problems, so that people could change their attitudes towards the problems. People are hoped to take action to solve the problems and build the harmonious society. Therefore, the analysis of public service advertisements has great significance. At present some scholars do researches on public service advertisements, but the analysis of PSA in terms of multimodality is not often seen.The interactive meaning of PSAs will be explored from the perspective of social semiotics. The author collects 60 public service advertisements,30 English and 30 Chinese from some famous animal protection organizations, magazines and websites of advertisements. The theme of the collected PSAs covers environmental protection, caring for the elderly and anti-smoking etc., involving both verbal mode and visual mode. The author combines quantitative analysis with qualitative analysis in the discussion of the data. The quantitative analysis is used to probe into the use of different theoretical principles while the qualitative analysis is used to clarify how the interactive meaning of PSAs is realized verbally and visually. To be specific, the interpersonal meaning in verbiage is analyzed through mood system, modality and person system while the interactive meaning in images is analyzed through contact, social distance, perspective and modality. As for qualitative analysis, Royce’s Inter-semiotic Complementarity theory is also used to study how verbal mode works with visual mode together in construing the personal meaning of public service advertisements to achieve the purpose of persuasion.The findings of the study are as follows:verbally the declarative mood is the most frequently employed mood structure which offers information about social problems to the public. The imperative is the second frequently used. The advertisers use imperatives to demand people to take positive action in achieving the persuasive effects of PSAs. In terms of modality, the low value modal operator occupies the largest proportion, because its use can express the social issues politely and do not put too much pressure on the public, so that the public are more willing to do as the advertisers expect. The frequent use of the second person pronoun shortens people’s distance.As for the visual mode, the image act "demand" and "offer" are both employed in a similar proportion. Images ask the viewers to do something or ponder the situation by using demand or offer. A Chinese PSA is analyzed to manifest the interpersonal complemetarity between verbiage and images which is realized through reinforcement of address and attitudinal congruence.This study enriches the research on PSAs, helps the advertisers make better advertisements and the public understand advertisements better.