A Contrastive Multimodal Study On Chinese And English Traffic Safety Public Service Advertisements

People transmit information not only by language but also by other modes in the information era. Multimodal discourse has become an indispensable part in people’s daily life.Halliday puts forward Systemic Functional Grammar. He points out that language has three metafunctions: ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. Then, his theory is applied in many other fields. At the end of the twentieth century, Kress and van Leeuwen come up with Visual Grammar in the light of Halliday’s SFG. They think that image has functions just as language which are representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning.Based on multimodal theory, this thesis analyzes English and Chinese TSPSAs, makes a contrastive analysis between them to find the similarities and differences and try to figure out the cause of the similarity and differences from the view of cross-cultural communication. All TSPSAs( thirty English and thirty Chinese TSPSAs) are chosen from the Internet. Six of the TSPSAs describe the same theme which is “Stay away from Drunk Driving” and they are analyzed in detail to know how the text and image cooperate to realize meaning from SFG and VG, what is the relation between text and image from the Image-Text relation. Then, this thesis analyzes the image in each TSPSA in terms of their representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning, meanwhile it analyzes the ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function of the language, also the image-text relation. The features of English TSPSAs and Chinese TSPSAs are discussed by overall quantitative analysis. Finally, differences and similarities between English and Chinese TSPSAs are found out, also the writer tries to figure out the cause of them.According to the analysis, action process and symbolic process are more commonly used. Image offer is applied in all the Chinese TSPSAs and 23 English TSPSAs. Long shot has the lowest rate only used in 6 Chinese TSPSAs and English TSPSAs. In 21 Chinese TSPSAs and 19 English TSPSAs, eye-eye angle is used the most frequently which reflects the current situation in China that people-oriented concept is vigorously advocated now. Centre and margin composition is applied the most in Chinese and English PSAs on traffic safety. There are also differences. Symbolic process is used at the highest rate in Chinese PSAs while action process is applied in half of the English PSAs which shows the high-context in China and low-context in western countries. Medium shot is used in 21 Chinese TSPSAs which are symbols of the changes in China that the government now values the public’s ideas more. For English PSAs, close shot is involved in half of them which are symbols of small power distance in western countries. For the placement of slogans, there are not clear differences among those three kinds in Chinese PSAs. However, 18 in 30 English PSAs are made with the slogans put at the bottom and two thirds of English PSAs have texts and images cooperated. This research can help readers understand English and Chinese multimodal TSPSAs accurately and comprehensively. It can also help people to grasp the differences between Chinese and western culture and the changes in Chinese culture.