Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Cosmetics Advertisements On TV

With the development of science and technology,the way people communicate with each other has changed deeply.Language has been complemented by the complex media,such as,images,and voice.Since the 1990 s,researchers of systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis have been interested in the extension of systemic functional grammar to non-verbal semiotic resources,such astechnology,images,color and music,and so on.Against such a background,the thesis mainly focuses on the synthetic analysis of MARY KAY's video advertisements in five years under the multimodal discourse analysis framework.The present study collects five years' video advertisements of MARY KAY as the typical example to carry out the multimodal analysis based on Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics,Kress and van Leeuwen's Visual Grammar and Royce's Intersemiotic complementarity.The thesis centers on the research of the characteristics of the meaning-making process of MARY KAY's video advertisements,which can be conducted from four aspects: the realization of the three metafunctions of the verbal texts,the meaning-making process of the dynamic discourse,the relation between language and images in the video advertisements and how the relationship between producers and viewers is established through language and images.Both qualitative and quantitative methods are adopted in this study.Firstly,the verbal texts of the video advertisements are analyzed to see how the ideational,interpersonal and textual meanings are realized based on Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics.Secondly,the advertisements are transcribed into different shots to see how the representational,interactive and compositional meanings are achieved.Then the relationship between verbal texts and images is analyzed.Lastly,based on the synthetic analysis of both verbal texts and images,the relationship between the advertisers and viewers can be discussed.The thesis has arrived at several conclusions: firstly,in terms of the analysis of the verbal texts of the video advertisements,more material processes and declarative moods are used.Most of the themes are not marked and do not refer to the represented participants.Secondly,in terms of the dynamic images,more narrative processes,offer acts,oblique angles,eye-to-eye angles and close-up shots are used.Thirdly,in terms of the relation between language and images,they can interplay with each other to convey the potential meaning.Lastly,based on the synthetic analysis of language and images,we can find that the advertisers tend to establish an equal relationship between them and the consumers.Not only can the study provide a new angle for multimodal discourse analysis,but also some useful advice can be offered to the advertisers to help promote their products.