A Contrastive Analysis Of The Interactive Meaning In Chinese And English Traffic Safety Public Service Advertisements From The Perspective Of Multimodality

With the rapid development of society and the diversification of information transmission channels,Multimodal Discourse Analysis(thereafter MDA)is widely used in texts,sounds,images,and other multimodal texts.Kress and van Leeuwen put forward the theory of Visual Grammar based on Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar,and advocate that images also perform three meta-functions,which include the representational meaning,the interactive meaning and the compositional meaning.Traffic safety public service advertisements(thereafter TSPSAs)are dedicated to nurturing people's travel habits and promoting the safe and healthy development of traffic.Based on multimodal theory and the framework of Kress and van Leeuwen's Visual Grammar,this study makes a contrastive analysis of English and Chinese TSPSAs from the perspectives of contact,social distance,perspective,and modality in the interactive meaning,and aims to find the similarities and differences between the Chinese and English TSPSAs.In consideration of the methodology of quantitative and qualitative analysis,this study selects 60 Chinese TSPSAs and 60 English TSPSAs in terms of the themes of animate human,and inanimate objects respectively,which are collected from some authoritative websites in the internet.After doing a comparative study of collected Chinese and English TSPSAs data,some major findings are shown in the following aspects.On one hand,in terms of similarities,firstly,as for contact,both Chinese and English TSPSAs adopt a higher percent of the “offer” act to highlight the objectivity and truthfulness of TSPSAs.Secondly,as for social distance,both Chinese and English TSPSAs adopt a similar percent of long distance to show some true and objective traffic safety information to the viewers,raising viewers' urgency to participate in traffic safety problems.Thirdly,as for perspective,both Chinese and English TSPSAs adopt a higher percent of the eye-to-eye angle to build an intimate relationship between the viewers and the animate human,and inanimate objects in the picture,and to enhance viewers' participation in traffic safety activities.On the other hand,in terms of differences,firstly,as for contact and perspective,Chinese TSPSAs use a slight higher percentage of the “demand” act and the frontal angle to strongly demand viewers to establish correct traffic safety travel habits,while English TSPSAs use a higher percentage of the “offer” act and the oblique angle to emphasize the authenticity and objectivity of the tragic accident scenes in TSPSAs.Secondly,as for social distance,Chinese TSPSAs use a higher percentage of the middle distance to emphasize the sociality of traffic safety problems,while English TSPSAs adopt a larger percent of the close distance to narrow the distance between the viewers and the represented participants,as well as to increase viewers' awareness of traffic accidents.Thirdly,Chinese TSPSAs use a higher percentage of the high angle to emphasize the power of the represented participants,influenced by the represented participants' practical power,enhancing the responsibility of viewers to participate in traffic safety activities;while English TSPSAs use a higher percentage of the low angle to emphasize the power of viewers,then the viewers can use their power to strongly urge people to develop a good habit of obeying traffic rules.Lastly,as for modality,Chinese TSPSAs use a higher percentage of medium and high modality to emphasize the importance of traffic safety to a harmonious and warm family,while English TSPSAs use a higher percent of the low modality to stress a sad,dismal and depressed atmosphere of traffic scenes.This study further strengthens that the MDA is applicable in interpreting TSPSAs,and broadens the research scope of MDA.What's more,a contrastive research between Chinese and English TSPSAs from the perspective of interculture,which boosts the understanding and comprehension of foreign cultures for both Chinese and English viewers.