A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of FIFA World Cup Posters

Linguistic semiotics have always been the object of study in traditional discourse analysis, which maintains that verbal and printed languages are the major forms for information transmission, and concentrates on the linguistic system, semantic system and the relation between social culture and cognition. With the fast development of science and technology, especially the great progress in multimedia, people's ways of communication have presented a multimodal trend. Discourses which are constructed by solo written symbols cannot meet the purpose of communication. So as to achieve rapid and effective communication, various social symbols like image, sound and gesture are preferred to be engaged in information transmission. Multimodal discourse evolved gradually. To improve and complete the study of non-linguistic semiotics, Kress and Van Leeuwen(1996)proposed Visual Grammar in the nineties of the twentieth century. They held the opinion that people live in a multimodal context, in which linguistic symbols are always produced with visual symbols and audio symbols. Thus, non-linguistic semiotics should also be studied systematically and thoroughly.Due to the fact that the study of multimodal discourse has started lately, there exist some research gaps in this field. Up to now, multimodal discourse analysis concentrates on static images. Among these images, posters are the most preferred and frequently studied. While the previous studies always focus on the commercial ones like movie posters and those captured from advertisement, the studies of posters for cultural transmission are not as systemic and complete as commercial posters, especially from a social semiotic perspective.With the World Cup being one of the most prevalent sport events all around the world and regarded as a cultural and social phenomenon, the significance of World Cup posters is acknowledged. As an indispensable component of this event, posters demonstrate the historical and cultural characteristics of host countries as well as the spirit of sports with its image, color and printed language. It is a completely new attempt to employ Kress and Van Leeuwen's Visual Grammar from the perspective of social semiotics, and conduct a multimodal discourses analysis of 20 FIFA World Cup posters in terms of representational meaning, interactive meaning, and compositional meaning with the aim of finding out how these different semiotic resources construct meaning by analyzing and contrasting the results. Meanwhile, its findings can provide us with a comprehensive understanding and inspiration when we design posters of big events for our own country.