A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English Cosmetic Advertisements From The Perspective Of Multi-modal Discourse Analysis

Advertising,which is good at employing various modes including images,texts,sounds,etc.,has become one of the crucial tools to publicize the brand value and presented products thanks to the thriving of mass media,and it is an inevitable trend to adopt the multi-modal analysis structure which consists of both visual and verbal modes in advertisement research.Based on Halliday's Systematic Functional Grammar,Kress and Van Leeuwen(1996)put forward Visual Grammar,a framework for visual analysis,providing a new tool and perspective for multi-modal discourse analysis.Besides,with the rapid development of economy,the living standard of people has been greatly improved.The market share of cosmetic products is growing constantly as people pay more and more attention to their appearance and beauty.Meanwhile,as one of the most important promotion methods,cosmetic advertisement plays a crucial role which cannot be ignored.Under the theoretical framework of SFG and VG,this thesis collects 50 Chinese print cosmetic advertisements and 50 English ones respectively from the most representative advertisement websites,combines the research methods including qualitative,quantitative and contrastive analysis so as to study the visual and verbal resources of collected data.After the in-depth analysis,the author summarizes the similarities and differences between Chinese and English cosmetic advertisements and finally tries to explore the underlying reasons from cultural dimensions.The samples are highly representative and in line with the theoretical framework,for they are mainly collected from some authoritative websites with wide coverage and high acceptability.After the in-depth analysis,salient differences are revealed between the collected Chinese and English print cosmetic advertisements in terms of the construction of visual and verbal contents.Firstly,English print cosmetic advertisements tend to employ more narrative and material processes than Chinese counterparts,presenting the images in a more vivid and story-telling way.Secondly,English advertisements frequently place the participants in the center and basic and persuasive information in the bottom as something real,while Chinese counterparts prefer to place such information on the top so as to achieve a better persuasive effect.In addition,English advertisements feature higher frequency of imperatives in verbal contents,persuading the viewers to take purchasing actions in a more direct and powerful way,while Chinese counterparts prefer declaratives,describing the features of advertised products more objectively.Last but not least,Chinese advertisers prefer to use the rhetoric device--pun in the announcements,which seldom appears in English ones,expressing both the literal meaning and implied meaning at the same time.The differences mentioned above can be interpreted from the high context& low context theory introduced by Edward T.Hall,and Hofstede's cultural dimensions including power distance and uncertainty avoidance.Chinese advertisements tend to convey the information in a more implicit way for the high context culture,at the same time,they have low tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity and are willing to accept the existence of privileges for the high power distance and uncertainty avoidance.While English counterparts prefer to directly present persuasive information and make more efforts to build an equal and intimate relation between the participants and viewers for their low context culture,low power distance and uncertainty avoidance.This research further validates the applicability and practicality of the theoretical framework of multimodal discourse analysis in interpreting Chinese and English print cosmetic advertisements and enriches the research methods of print cosmetic advertisements.Through the contrastive analysis of print advertisements deriving from different culture and the exploration of underlying reasons for the comparison results,it is hoped that this research shed some light on advertisement design and improve the overall appreciate level of viewers on advertisements.