Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Automobile Print Advertisement From The Perspective Of Visual Grammar

The 21st century is an information age,witnessing the rapid development of multimedia technology,which has made tremendous changes in the way people transmit information.The single verbal mode can no longer meet the needs of human communication.The emergence of images,sounds,video and other multimedia has greatly enriched people's way of information transmission,and people begin to pay attention to other symbolic resources related to language.In this context,Multimodal Discourse Analysis(MDA)comes into being.In the 1990 s,Kress and van Leeuwen extended Halliday's idea of meta-functions in Systemic-functional linguistics to the visual mode and proposed a Visual Grammar for visual mode analysis,which lays a solid theoretical foundation for the follow-up multimodal discourse research.With the development of economic globalization,the international competition in all walks of life is becoming increasingly fierce.As a pillar industry of manufacturing industry in many countries,the status of automobile industry is self-evident.While striving to improve industrial technology and appearance design of the car,many automobile companies attach great importance to the white-hot advertising war.A well-made advertisement cannot only attract the attention of consumers,but also show the brand characteristics with ingenuity.Therefore,the study of automobile print advertisement has certain practical significance.Based on the framework and analytical structure of Visual Grammar,this study uses content analysis and case study to conduct multimodal discourse analysis on 60 automobile print advertisements collected.By analyzing the realization of representational meaning,interpersonal meaning and compositional meaning of three meta-functions in automobile print advertisements,the general multimodal discourse characteristics of automobile print advertisements are explored.It is found that narrative representation and the conceptual representation take up a very close proportion when the designer expresses the representational meaning.In narrative representation,advertisement designers incline to use action process and reaction process to construct meaning since speeding cars on the road are frequently used to show the performance and speed of the car in which the road crossing the picture space obliquely constitutes thevector of action process.And eyeline serves as a vector to express people's desire for automobiles.While in conceptual representation,advertisement designers prefer to use symbolic process to convey meaning,because they often borrow other objects to symbolize the appearance and performance of the car.When expressing interactive meanings,offering image is frequently used to provide information to consumers.Long shot,oblique and eye-eye angle,and high modality are often used to manifest the social and public attribute of the car.When expressing the meaning of composition,left-right position is more favored by advertisement designers,and the elements are usually weakly framed to express the integrity of meaning.In addition,through an integrated analysis of a car print advertisement,it is found that visual mode and verbal mode enjoy equal status and the latter is usually an expansion of the former.This study analyzes automobile print advertising from the standpoint of Multimodal Discourse Analysis,which provides a new angle for the study of automobile print advertising,and at the same time broadens the field of Multimodal Discourse research.In addition,this study will provide inspirations and references for advertising designers when designing images.What's more,this study hopes to be able to enhance the ability of consumers to appreciate automobile print advertising.