A Mulitimodal Discourse Analysis Of Automobile Print Advertisements

With the rapid development of science and technology,people have entered the information age and the new media era,which has led to dramatic changes in people's communication ways.In the past,text was the main form to construct meaning and major research object of discourse analysis.While now,information conveying not only depends on text,gesture,color,picture,sound and other non-verbal resources also play an important role,people's communication ways are moving towards multimodality.In the 1990 s,based on social semiotics and Halliday's systemic functional grammar,Kress and van Leeuwen created visual grammar to analyze visual image,which laid a solid foundation of multimodal discourse analysis.With the improvement of people's living standards,cars have become the necessities in life.Most automobile companies seek to design exquisite and excellent print advertisements so as to attract customers' attention and promote car sales.Therefore,to study automobile print advertisement is of practical significance.Based on Kress and van Leeuwen's visual grammar,this thesis aims to do a multimodal discourse analysis of automobile print advertisements by adopting qualitative and quantitative method,collecting 100 automobile print advertisements from Fortune Global 500.By analyzing three meta-functions of visual image,the research finds that action and reactional process are more likely used in representational meaning.High modality and frontal angle are employed to achieve solidarity and be more naturalistic in interactive meaning.In compositional meaning,slogan is often placed at the top,while car is placed at the bottom.In addition,the research also concludes that the relationship between visual and verbal mode is complementary.The findings of this research are inclined to provide some suggestions for image producer.