The Construction Of Interactive Meaning In Multimodal Anti-Smoking Advertising Discourse

Compared with commercial advertisements, multimodal discourse analysis is less concerned with public service advertisements. Anti-smoking advertisements, strongly persuasive and warning, aim to persuade audience to quit or avoid smoking, whose interactive meaning is worth attention. Based on Functional Grammar, Visual Grammar and Multimodal Metaphor, this thesis collected100English anti-smoking print advertisements, aiming to study the process of interactive meaning construction and the cognitive motivation through quantitative and qualitative methods. The percentage of every element contributing to constructing the interactive meaning and every verbal-visual representation mean in multimodal metaphor is provided, followed by further description of the realization of interactive meaning.The major findings are as follows:(1) The interpersonal meaning of the verbal mode is realized through mood, modality and person. Declarative mood and second person are widely used (65%&63%), but modality rarely exists (12%). Through fear appeal, declarative mood offers the harm of smoking, making viewers feared; the second person refers particularly to an individual viewer, forming a one-to-one interaction; rarely used modality affirms the credibility of the harm of smoking.(2) The interactive meaning of the visual mode is realized through contact, social distance, perspective and modality. Widely used "offering" image (98%) corresponds with the role of declarative mood to present the harm of smoking; close and medium distance, intimate and close personal distance take up large proportions (98%&67%), corresponding with the role of second person to shorten the interactive distance with viewers; commonly used frontal angle and eye-level angle (72%&72%) respectively indicates the involvement of viewers in the danger of smoking and equality; besides, high modality makes the depicted harms of smoking seem real.(3) Widely used multimodal metaphor (65%) guides viewers to interpret the harm of smoking through familiar concepts and influence their attitude, providing the cognitive motivation for the interactive meaning construction. The findings contribute to developing people’s multiliteracies and provide reference for public service advertisements designing.