Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Pepsi Print Advertisements

Discourse analysis is an old subject which can be traced back to the period of ancient Greece. However, it only concentrates on language, and ignores other social semiotic resources such as image, sound and color.With the rapid development of science and technology, we have come into the digital age. The way of our communication has changed a lot and language is no longer the only way to express meaning. More and more other social semiotic resource such as image, sound and color have emerged and have had an influence on our way of communication. We cannot have a comprehensive study on the discourse if we only study from the linguistic perspective. Therefore, Multimodal Discourse Analysis(MDA)emerged. Print advertisement is a typical multimodal discourse in that it includes different semiotic resources such as images, colors and language. The author chooses 30 Pepsi print advertisements to make a multimodal discourse analysis with the aim of investigating representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning and testifies the applicability of the grammar of visual design. The most representative scholars in the field of multimodal discourse analysis are Kress and Vau Leeuwen who built grammar of visual design based on Halliday’s systemic-functional functional grammar, which is adopted by many scholars who study the multimodal discourse analysis.The thesis shows that the grammar of visual design is a powerful tool to analyze print advertisement’s multimodality. In print advertisement, verbal information and visual information combine together to make meanings in that visual information play the pivotal role. Most of the chosen print advertisements accord with the grammar of visual design. However, some print advertisements deviate from the grammar. Print advertisement designers tend to adopt “narrative process” to realize representational meaning; employ “offer gaze”, “horizontal angle”, “personal and impersonal distance”and high modality to achieve interactive meaning; use “centre and margin” information value and salience to create compositional meaning. In addition, more animated figures will be depicted in Pepsi print advertisements and these advertisements tend to be portrayed in a more artistic and symbolic way.