Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Wahaha Beverage Print Ads

In the mid-1960 s,discourse analysis has finally developed itself into an independent research field,focusing on the language system and the semantic structure.However,in this field little attention is paid to the study of other forms of expression such as images,sounds,colors,etc.,which is the great limitation of traditional discourse analysis.When multimodal discourse analysis comes into being,it covers the shortage of discourse analysis.In the mature market of the beverage industry,various beverage companies have invested heavily in advertising to promote products,and the print ads with easy-to-spread and price-flexible features account for a large share of investment.The print ads,with such constituent elements as words,illustrations,trademarks and colors,convey product information in the form of pictures and texts,which makes them typical multimodal contexts.Through the multimodal discourse analysis of 50 classic print ads of ten major drink types from the official website of Wahaha,this thesis establishes a comprehensive analysis framework of print ads from both intrasemiotic and intersemiotic perspectives: the meanings of their verbal symbols are analyzed from the three systems of Halliday?s Systemic Functional Grammar,namely transitivity,mood and thematic structure,and the image meanings from Visual Grammar by Kress and Van Leeuwen in terms of three aspects of meaning(representational,interactive and compositional).Finally,the intersemiotic complementarity is used to analyze the relationship between verbal symbols and image symbols and how they construct the overall meaning.The main findings of the thesis are: in the analysis of verbal symbols,the systems of transferring objective meanings are favorably applied in Wahaha print ads to promote products,with the existential process,the declarative mood and the marked theme used frequently;in the analysis of image symbols,they realize the function of Visual Grammar by constructing the representational,interactive and compositional meanings,with both the dynamic narrative representation and static conceptual representation frequently used to convey the representational meaning,the offering contact and middle social distance applied to convey interactive meaning,and the elements placed in different ways to convey compositional meaning with the images in print ads put as the known information and the slogans as the new information;in the analysis of the relationship between the verbal and image symbols,the repetition and synonymy are mainly adopted to achieve semantic cohesion,the attitudinal congruence is used to make the visual and verbal modes cooperate to convey the integrate interpersonal meaning,and the purposeful distribution of each element or feature is applied to construct a complete discourse to achieve the compositional meaning.By using the multimodal discourse analysis method rooted in the West in the analysis of Chinese print ads,this thesis illustrates its wide applicability.At the same time,through the deep analysis of the interaction and aggregation between language and image in advertising,it breaks the limitations of traditional advertising discourse analysis,and can provide some reference and suggestions for advertising designers to better promote the development of beverage advertising industry.