The Visual-Verbal Meaning Construction Of Public Service Posters From Inter-Semiotic Complementary Perspective

In recent years,many researches have been done on public service posters,most of which analyze visual meaning or verbal meaning from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis and communication analysis.Nevertheless,the meaning of public service posters is embodied by the cooperation of the visual and verbal information.The analysis of visual-verbal meaning construction is the key point to comprehend its embodied meaning.Thus from inter-semiotic complementary perspective,this thesis chooses 90 socialist core values posters which stand for the mainstream of our society as the research data to explore what kinds of meanings they construct together as well as how the visual and verbal information in public service posters construct meaning.This thesis finds that visual-verbal ideational inter-semiotic complementary,interpersonal inter-semiotic complementary,and compositional inter-semiotic complementary are the main aspects to construct meanings.There are two ways to construct visual-verbal meaning through ideational inter-semiotic complementary.Through visual-verbal synonymy,they achieve the goal of enhancing awareness of the public on the cultural spirit of public service posters.Through visual-verbal repetition,they succeed in deepening the comprehension of the public on the cultural spirit of public service posters.Visual-verbal meaning constructed by interpersonal inter-semiotic complementary is embodied by visual-verbal address and visual-verbal modality.Through visual-verbal reinforcement of address,they realize the goal of manifesting educational meaning of public service posters.Through visual-verbal modality congruence,they achieve the goal of proposing its values.Visual-verbal meaning construction through compositional inter-semiotic complementary mainly has two ways including visual-verbal layout and visual-verbal salience.The clear placements of left-right type and top-bottom type,with cohesion system embodied bygrammatical cohesion and rhetorical devices of antithesis and parallelism makes a difference in influencing the cognition of the public.Positive color modes and different sizes,collaborating with the use of topic themes,achieve the goal of affecting the judgments of the public.By means of the above three aspects,public service posters embody the meaning of conveying cultural spirit,guiding social mainstream as well as accumulating public's resonance to make its meaning accepted and understood by the public easier.The thesis explores the meaning construction of such corpora more comprehensively.It not only expands the research perspective of public service posters but also provides a certain reference for the visual-verbal allocation of such corpora.Meanwhile,it opens up the model of linguistic study to a certain extent,making up for the shortcomings of using only meta-functions of texts to analyze whole meaning construction of discourse or only using visual grammar to analyze the visual meaning in the past.However,the corpus selection is limited in this study,further study should be done in the future.