A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis On Tourism Advertisements

With the continuous development of discourse analysis,discourse analysts have found that it is not sufficient to make a deep and comprehensive research from the perspective of language alone.Instead,they construct meaning through textual,visual and other resources.In recent years,traveling,as a way to help people go after spiritual satisfaction,is becoming more and more popular.And tourism advertisements have become the basis of their traveling.Thus,it is of great value and significance to make a multimodal discourse analysis on tourism advertisements to raise the readers’ multiliteracy and critical ability..This thesis selects 30 tourism advertisements from The New York Timesand www.sightseeing.comas the research data to examine how meaning is constructed through visual resources and textual resources and how they can work together to achieve integrally persuasive meaning.This thesis is based on the framework of Kress and van Leeuwen’s VG,using critical discourse analysis.Qualitative and quantitative analysis methods are applied in this thesis to analyze the tourism advertisements,exploring how texts and images influence the choice of travel destinations.The study shows that advertisers widely employ narrative process to realize the represented function.Advertisers mainly apply visual contact,social distance and attitude to realize the interactive meaning.Long shot is frequently used in tourism advertisements to make a whole scale of tourism destinations to arouse their strong desires for travel.Information value,salience and framing,especially the size and the color are main ways to achieve the composition function of images.In textual analysis,advertisers use low and median value to shorten distance between advertisers and readers and show politeness and credibility.As for lexical choice,most of positive words leave good impression upon readers and hence to arouse viewers’ desire to take a trip.Various uses of second person pronouns can create a face-to-face communicative effect to achieve the purposes of attracting attention of readers,strengthening the relationship between advertisers and potential tourists.In addition,verbal mode and visual mode enforce and complement with each other to construct the best effect of persuasion.It is helpful for viewers to comprehensively read the tourism advertisements.