A Contrastive Study Of Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Chinese And American Print Public Service Advertisements

With multimedia technology and Internet advance, people are gradually aware that human social language communication is multimodal in nature. However, traditional discourse analysts just pay more attention to the analysis of the language without taking the other meaning-making resources like image, sound, color etc. into consideration. Therefore, the research focusing on discourse must be shifted into multimodal discourse analysis. Kress and Van Leeuwen(1996), based on Halliday's systemic functional linguistics(SFL), presents the notion of Visual Grammar(VG), which provides a novel perspective for multimodal discourse analysis. Thus Multimodal Discourse Analysis(hereafter MDA) emerges and soon gains a rapid development.Public service advertisement, as a kind of multimodal discourse composed of language, image, color, etc. aiming to publicize the public's awareness of social problems and urge people to take positive actions to solve problems, plays an increasingly important role in social life. Until now, though many researches on public service advertisement have been carried out from many perspectives, rare studies of public service advertisement have been done from perspective of multimodal discourse analysis. Especially, researches of contrastive study of Chinese and English public service advertisement are relatively not enough.In combination with quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis, this research chooses 50 Chinese and 50 American print public service advertisements as research objects, which are collected from authoritative magazines and official websites of commonweal organizations. Based on systemic-functional grammar and visual grammar, this study attempts to make a contrastive study of the interactive meaning about Chinese and American public service advertisement from the perspective of Multimodal Discourse Analysis and aims to find out the differences and similarities between Chinese and American public service advertisement in terms of the construction of interactive meaning. Furthermore, this research is beneficial to improve readers' multimodal discourse literacy and provide useful and professional implications for Chinese and American advertisers.The major findings of the research are listed as follows: firstly, as for the visual mode, the interactive meaning is constructed through mood, modality and person system. The similarity lies in that the declarative mood and low value modal operators are most frequently used in both Chinese and American public service advertisements. The differences are that Chinese print public service advertisements employ more interrogatives, exclamatives, high value modal operators and third person while American print public service advertisements favor more imperatives, median modal operators and second person. Secondly, as for the visual mode, the interactive meaning is constructed through contact, social distance and perspective. The similarity lies in that offer images and the eye-level are most frequently used in both Chinese and American public service advertisements. The differences are that oblique angle; the long shot are preferred by Chinese print public service advertisements while American ones tend to take more demand images, frontal angle and the close shot and the medium shot, indicating a higher degree of intimacy with readers.To some degree, this research further validates that multimodal discourse analysis is of applicability and practicability in interpreting print public service advertisements, which could broaden the research field of multimodal discourse analysis and enrich approaches to the study of print public service advertisements. Besides, a contrastive study between intercultural print public service advertisements is conducted, which, for one thing, helps Chinese and American readers better comprehend intercultural print public service advertisements accurately, and for another, offers efficient methods for Chinese and American advertisers to produce more influencing and profound works.