Multimodal Discourse Analysis On Print Automobile Advertisements

With the application of Internet and modern technology, tremendous changes have taken place in our daily life. In the digital and information age, we are exposed to a world of linguistic and non-linguistic information sources. People use multiple signs to express emotion as they get to know the world. People communication with others is no longer restricted to monomodal (language). Rather multimodalized communication becomes the norm in which various semiotic modes are co-employed to convey meaning. Traditional approaches seem too limited to impede the development of discourse analysis. Therefore, a brand new form of discourse analysis came into being; that is multimodal discourse analysis. The pioneering work, Reading Images, marks the new age of multimodal discourse analysis. Kress & van Leeuwen have proposed three dimensions to demonstrate how the three metafunctions are realized in visual communication, that is, representational meaning, interactional meaning and compositional meaning.Nowadays, car has been an integral part in our daily life. With the flourishing of the automobile industry, car advertisements are prevalent. To achieve different artistic effect, the advertisements vary from one to another. The automobile advertisements are exquisitely designed so as to attract customers’attention. Automobile advertisements, in fact, are of multimodal semiotic forms, which consists of two semiotic modes-verbal mode and image mode. It’s true that print auto ads only involves these two modes. The two modes integrate and coordinate with each other to better promote the perception of the car brand. The collected 50 automobile advertisements will be analyzed from the perspective of three metafunctions:representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning.The thesis may contribute to the field of multimodal discourse analysis both theoretically and practically. Firstly, it offers new perspective in analyzing car advertisements, while breaking the limitation of the traditional mono-modal researches about car advertisements. Moreover, it extends the application field of mulimodal discourse analysis and proves the feasibility of applying Halliday’s Functional Grammar into the multisemiotic discourse of automobile advertisements composed of verbal and non-verbal images in visual communication. In practice, it serves as a unique method to improve the advertisers and viewers’multiliteracy to comprehend and appreciate advertisements. At the same time, the study can give the designers some insight and reference for advertisements design.Altogether, the thesis can be divided into six parts. The first part is an introductory part. In the second part, the literature review of multimodal discourse analysis both at home and abroad and foreign and domestic advertising discourse analysis are illustrated in detail. In the third part, both theories and methods are presented. In the fourth part, an outline of the research design and methodology of the thesis is made. There are four sections in this part:research questions, data collection, research method and the analysis procedures. The fifth part mainly focuses on the practical analysis of the automobile advertisements based on the theory of Visual Grammar. It dwells on quantitative study of the overall features of the automobile advertisements. Also, the synthetic analysis will be conducted to find out how the three meaning are integrated to construe meanings. The sixth part is the conclusion. It includes major findings, the limitations of the present study and the implication for the study in the future.