A Contrastive Study On Chinese And American Commercial Advertisements From The Perspective Of Multimodality

The information dissemination and the way of communication in modern society are no longer confined to only language.It tends to use a variety of communication modes to achieve the purpose of communication.In recent years,in the field of sociolinguistics,there has been an increasing number of studies on multimodal discourses.However,the contrastive research on commercial advertisements between China and American has rarely been carried on from a multimodal perspective.Therefore,it is particularly necessary to carry out the related research.In view of this,the subject of this paper is the contrastive study on Chinese and America commercial advertisements in the perspective of multimodality.This research adopts both quantitative and qualitative research methods in order to enhance the reliability and validity of the study.The data of the study was mainly selected from commercial advertisements of major media in China and America.Multimodal discourse analysis helps to analyze discourse in many aspects such as language and image.Therefore,based on the interactive meaning of visual grammar,this paper will focus on the analysis of the image modalities from three aspects of contact meaning,social distance and the perspective of attitude.At the same time,as for the language modality,this paper focuses on the study over the interpersonal functions of advertisements language in the aspects of attracting customers and marketing products.The objective of the research is to find out the similarities and differences between Chinese and American commercial advertisements through the comparative study,find out the interpersonal function of commercial advertising language in the marketing process,and take advantage of the merits in American advertisements so as to promote Chinese products and Chinese culture to the world.In terms of image modality,American commercial advertisements prefer “offer acts”,while Chinese commercial advertisements prefer “demand acts”.However,both Chinese and American advertising are committed to inducing and persuading customers to purchase products.In addition,the research also find that American commercial advertisements pay more attention to the protection of personal privacy,and reflect the equal status between advertisers and consumers.From the aspect of language modality,Chinese commercial advertisements often use imperative sentences.American commercial advertisements often use declarative sentences,and pay more attention to introducing their products.In terms of the value of research,this research could help people to perceive the similarities and differences between Chinese and the American commercial advertisements,benefit us to learn from American commercial advertisements,enhance the quality of our commercial advertisements,integrate the excellent Chinese culture into our products,and push the excellent Chinese culture and products to the world.