Cultural Comparative Analysis Of The Chinese And American Beverage Brand Homepages From The Perspective Of Visual Grammar

Webpage is the platform of information spreading and information communication,and it is also an important way of commodity promotion,which plays an important role in the information-based and commercialized society.There are lots of multimodal semiotic resources applied in webpage,constituting meaningful multimodal discourse.Visual grammar,put forward by Kress and van Leeuwen,is a relatively mature and systematic theoretical framework for multimodal discourse analysis.In the field of multimodal discourse analysis,language is not the only way to express meaning any more.More and more multimodal semiotic resources are used to construct meaning.Based on Halliday's three meta-functions,Kress and van Leeuwen put forward representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning,which constitute the theoretical system of visual grammar.As an effective measure to analyze visual symbols,visual grammar provides a theoretical basis for the meaning construction of multimodal discourse.Webpage is a kind of multimodal discourse,which can show the hidden cultural values and its sources by adopting visual grammar,providing the basis for webpage design and production.Therefore,the paper uses the framework of visual grammar theory and also adopts the method of cultural comparative analysis to conduct multimodal discourse analysis and empirical study,which is to analyze Chinese and American beverage brand homepages.Firstly,the paper introduces the background,questions,methodology and organization of the research.And then,the author conducts literature review to multimodal discourse analysis and webpage study,illustrating the limitations of the previous studies and the tendency of the further studies.Besides,representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning of visual grammar are interpreted and explained systematically.Under the framework of visual grammar,the author conducts data analysis to thirty data about Chinese and American beverage brand homepages respectively,and portrays the cultural values of the two countries concealing behind those homepages.Furthermore,the research demonstrates the existing reasons of the cultural values of the two countries.Last,the paper summarizes the findings,significance and limitations of the study and some suggestions for further study.The research of the paper shows that there exist significant differences between Chinese and American beverage brand homepages.Chinese beverage brand homepages present more collectivism value,and fragmented thinking,pay more attention to the harmony with nature and theory and academics,and show high powerdistance.American beverage brand homepages show more individualism value and coherent and systematic thinking,pay more attention to conquer nature and experience and practice,and present low power distance.All of the cultural differences are caused by the different civilizations,languages and thoughts,cosmologies,philosophies and politics of the two countries.There also exists contents about equal power in the Chinese beverage brand homepages,which is because of the social change of China.Through analyzing the Chinese and American beverage brand homepage images by applying the theory of visual grammar,the paper finds that the theory of visual grammar is suitable to conduct cultural comparative analysis towards beverage brand homepages,which can direct the beverage companies to design more suitable homepages in the level of culture,and assist the beverage companies in China to design English version to fit in American cultures,and those may achieve the goals of promoting enterprise brand,increasing sales and furthermore enhancing the intercultural business communication of the two countries.