Toward A Study Of Discourse Analysis On Public Service Advertisements From The Integrative Perspective Of Visual Grammar And Multimodal Metaphor

With the development of the society as well as the advancement of the science and technology,new media has gradually entered the public's vision and has received its great popularity from the world.New media has played an increasingly essential role in promoting the development of information and has also had a huge impact on people's lives.Nowadays,the arrival of the new media makes the transmission and exchange of information no longer adhere to the textual form.The expression and construction of meaning are not only confined to a single text form as well.People usually use visual sense,auditory sense,tactile sense,smell,and other senses,and apply language,text,images,sounds,colors,music,gestures,postures and other symbol resources to communicate.In other words,the traditional discourse analysis using language as the sole research object has failed to provide a entire and comprehensive interpretation of the meaning in discourse.Therefore,a multimodal discourse analysis with a variety of modalities working together and constructing meanings has emerged.This paper is divided into five chapters.Chapter one mainly elaborates the research background,research purpose,the significance and framework of the paper.Chapter two distinguishes the definitions of multimodality and multimodal discourse analysis,introduces the development of multimodal discourse analysis,and clarifies the research status of advertisements and public service advertisements discourse analysis at home and abroad.Chapter three explains the definition,characteristics,classification and function of public service advertisements,and provides theoretical support for the core chapter based on Kress and van Leeuwen's visual grammar as well as Forceville and Urios-Aparisi's multimodal metaphor.Chapter four is the main part of this paper,which discusses multimodal discourse analysis on public service advertisements.The public service advertisements selected in this section are based on the classification method summarized by a Japanese public service advertising scholar.In conjunction with the current affairs and hot issues,a total of six representative public service advertisements have been selected.They cover hot issues of the two sessions,traditional values,environmental protection issues,national health issues,anti-discrimination issues,and social civilization issues.At the end of this chapter,the author also summarizes the representational relationship among image meaning,literal meaning,and sound meaning that appear in each section of public service advertisements.Chapter five sums up the findings and contributions of this study and points out the limitations and suggestions.Through the combination of linguistic theories and public service advertisements,the findings of the thesis are displayed as follows:Firstly,the author adopts a unique research perspective to put public service advertisements into the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis,making up for the former researchers' monomodal analysis on language.Secondly,the study explores the educational and guiding meaning of public service advertisements from the perspective of multimodal analysis.The paper chooses public service advertisements as the corpus due to the advantages of combining image,language and sound together.Moreover,public service advertisements can bring about changes in the social conduct.Its influence and positive attitude toward life will inspire image viewers.By watching public service advertisements,people will be able to distinguish between right and wrong automatically,thus correcting wrong behavior or appealing to indifferent individuals to make individuals more outstanding and excellent as well as the society more harmonious and warmer.Public service advertisements can imperceptibly impel people to stress civilization and establish a new trend.Therefore,public service advertisements not only meet the analysis requirements of multimodal discourse,but also have a instructive function in social behavior.And such research is not merely academic but wide range of social significance as well.Thirdly,the former researchers generally choose one perspective to study multimodality of public service advertisements,that is,to study the interactive meaning.This paper explores the application of representative meaning,interactive meaning,and compositional meaning in it.In addition,this paper adopts multimodal metaphor to study public service advertisements as well.Compared with textual metaphor,multimodal metaphor combines non-verbal symbols such as images and background music to search how verbal signs and non-verbal signs interact to construct meanings.This kind of analysis is more direct to probe into its deep and inner meaning.Based on the above points,it is original,feasible,and educational to select multimodal discourse analysis on public service advertisements.The author conducts linguistic research on public service advertisements through theories of visual grammar and multimodal metaphor.This kind of research not only promotes the development of multimodal discourse analysis but also enriches the research method of public service advertisements,which pushes multimodal discourse analysis to a broader level.However,due to limited space,the author only studies part of the classification of public service advertisements.Only one or two advertisements are selected for each category.Hence,the number of public service advertisements is limited and the analysis may be not so comprehensive.In addition,personal analysis is more subjective,and may be not thoroughly studied in some angles and aspects.The author hopes that this tentative study is a reference in attracting and inspiring later scholars,which helps them to study more far-reaching and more academic papers.