Image Mode Discourse Analysis On Web Advertisements Based On Visual Grammar

In recent couple of years,with the rapid development of society,only language can't express people's views well any more.With the help of the multimedia,people can communicate with others more effectively by the images,sounds and videos.The multimodal discourse analysis springs up in the 1990s.So far,there are many scholars who have utilized the multimodal discourse analysis in many areas,for example,speeches,newspapers,printed advertisements,films,film posters and so on.But the web advertisements are seldom analyzed by this theory.Taking this situation into consideration,this study aims to analyze the meaning construction of the web advertisements from several aspects,for example,colors,words and composition of the images to find out that how the visual mode is utilized in the advertisements to convey meanings.One hundred pieces of advertisements are collected in this thesis from the homepage of eBay from April 1st,2018 to June 30th,2018.Based on the visual grammar,the images are analyzed by both quantitative method and qualitative method to interpret the data from the following aspects:the representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning.This is a multimodal research on eBay.This thesis aims to find out how the visual mode on online shopping websites constructs the meaning of the advertisements.This study tries to answer the following questions which are based on visual grammar.(1)How is the representational meaning of images constructed in the advertisements on eBay?(2)How is the interactive meaning of images constructed in the advertisements on eBay?(3)How is the compositional meaning of images constructed in the advertisements on eBay?The major findings are as follows:first,the narrative and conceptual processes are utilized to construct the representational meaning of the images.A conclusion is that the advertisements on eBay mainly illustrate the price and the function of the products since the conceptual process is applied more times than the narrative one.Second,the contact,the perspective,the social distance,and the modality are the main ways to construct the interactive meaning.After the analysis of the contact in these advertisements,a conclusion can be drawn that these advertisements mainly provide the features and the price of the products for the viewers rather than demand something from them since the offering act is applied more times than the demanding act.These advertisements seldom interact with the viewers.Based on the perspective in these advertisements,a conclusion can be drawn that these advertisers want to create an equal relationship with the viewers.At last,the information value,the salience and the framing construct the compositional meaning of the images together.Most of these advertisements have the text on the left side which means the text is the old information and the image on the right side is the new information.