A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Meaning Construction In The Web Advertisements

As a new direction for discourse analysis,multimodal discourse analysis has been applied to various fields,such as posters,newspapers,advertisements,films,websites,speeches,etc.However,there are still some fields that need further exploration through a multimodal approach,for example,the analysis of online shopping web advertisements.Therefore,this study aims to analyze the multimodal meaning construction of the advertisements on online shopping websites to explore how visual mode and verbal mode are adopted in the advertisements to convey meanings and interact with customers.The research data are 116 pieces of advertisements which are collected from the homepage of Amazon between October 1st,2015 and March 31 st,2016.Meanwhile,both quantitative method and qualitative method are utilized to study the data with systemic functional linguistics,visual grammar and image-text relation theories as theoretical foundations.Specifically,the texts of the advertisements are studied with regard to interpersonal meaning through mood and person system.The images are studied in terms of representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning on the basis of visual grammar.At last,the image-text relations are classified into specification,explanation and complement under the guidance of van Leeuwen's(2005)image-text relation theory.The major findings are as follows:(1)The interpersonal meaning of the texts is realized through mood and person systems.Most of the texts in the advertisements on Amazon are nominal and verbal phrases,which are short and concise.Among the clauses,imperative mood occupies a large proportion,while interrogative mood seldom appears.This indicates that the advertisements on Amazon mainly use phrases to offer product information and adopt imperative mood to supplement information and persuade customers to make purchases.In terms of person system,although the frequency of the second person ranks a little higher than that of the first person and the third person,the person system is equally distributed,presenting a real shopping environment with objective seller-buyer interaction.(2)The representational meaning of the images is constructed through narrative and conceptual processes.The number of conceptual images is large and that of narrative images is relatively small,which indicates that most of the advertisements on Amazon demonstrate the kinds and features of the products.The interactive meaning of the images is constructed through contact,social distance,perspective and modality.The number of offering images are three times that of the demanding images,which indicates that the advertisements mainly offer information of the products instead of demanding something from the customers.The represented participants are shown to viewers through medium shot,frontal and eye-level angle.This means the represented participants and the viewers keep social and equal relations.Additionally,the compositional meaning of the images is constructed through information value,salience and framing.The composition of images is mostly left-right type with text as given information and images as new information.(3)As to image-text relations,there are three kinds of relations: specification,explanation and complement.The main relationship between images and texts is specification,in which anchorage is more frequent.Complement ranks the second,while explanation is the last.This shows that the images and texts in the advertisements on Amazon mainly complement and specify the meanings of each other instead of offering repeated information.