Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Print Advertisements From The Perspective Of Social Semiotics

In modern communication, language is no longer the only way to express meanings. Other resources such as images, music, action and colors become indispensible forms of transmitting information. Therefore, the discourse analysis from the perspective of language cannot meet the requirement any more, and multimodality has been an irreversible trend.As an important medium of transmitting information, advertisements are a kind of multimodal discourse containing various semiotics. They play a significant role in modern life and deserve a close study. However, the researches on the advertising discourse mainly focus on the analysis of linguistic features, ignoring the analysis of other modes in meaning construction. Therefore, this thesis aims at exploring the functions of visual and verbal modes in ads and analyzing how the two modes cooperate to produce a coherent and unified discourse for the audience and influence their inner activities.The materials of this research are 60 print ads(30 commercial ads and 30 public service ads) chosen from some influential websites about advertising. This study combines qualitative study with quantitative study. At first, it gives a comprehensive study of two print samples—one is Chinese and the other is English, and then it examines the 60 ads. To state it more clearly, Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics is used to examine the three meta-functions of verbal resources in ads, and then Kress and van Leeuwen’s VG is deployed to study the meta-functions of visual parts. Lastly, Royce’s inter-semiotic complementarity is applied to explain the image-verbiage relation and analyze their roles in constructing a whole discourse. Besides, questionnaires are made to explore the advertising psychological effects.The research indicates that the visual and verbal modes realize three meta-functions in different ways and eventually produce joint forces in constructing unified discourses. From the dimension of ideational functions, two modes realize complementarity through different semantic relations such as synonymy, antonymy and repetition. From the dimension of interpersonal functions, visual and verbal resources reflect complement of address and attitude. However, from the compositional perspective, two modes cooperate to construct an integrated discourse.This research enriches the study of print discourses to some extent, and provides a new perspective for analyzing the advertising discourse.