Multimodal Discourse Construction Of Corporate Identity

Beijing subway advertisements(SAs,thereafter)serve as widely distributed visual semiotic resources,turning into one of the most significant channels to communicate and circulate the city's spiritual civilization.They have developed into a hot issue in the relevant disciplines.However,the researches on the correlation between corporate identities(CIs,thereafter)and the SAs have been seldom delved into.On this basis,this thesis is undertaken to articulate what and how the CIs have been constructed by the SAs through a case study about Beijing subway line 2 built and operated by Beijing Mass Transit Railway Operation Corporation Limited(BMTR,thereafter).The thesis categorizes the collected 1369 pieces of the SAs on the basis of the contextual variables of field and tenor and induces the CIs in accordance with the types of the SAs.Then it investigates how the CIs of the BMTR find expression in the representational and interactive resources based on the perspective of social semiotics and taking visual grammar as its analytical framework.The representational resources consist of the narrative processes and conceptual processes.The interactive resources contain four different systems,namely,the system of ambience,focalisation,social distance and perspective.In this study,four types of the SAs have been identified,namely,Beijing culture-related advertisements,political advertisements,public service advertisements,and commercial advertisements.Accordingly,four CIs of the BMTR have been constructed as the following: the devoted practitioner of the Beijing city master plan,passionate transmitter of national political ideology,warm and careful guardian of Beijing residents' life,and energetic commodities promoter.As for the representational realization,it is found that processes are realized simultaneously in an individual image in four types of the SAs.As for the interactive realization,it is found that the CIs are constructed in the ambience system by employment of vibrant colors in low and middle differentiation,in the focalisation by the presence and absence of eye contact between represented participants in the SAs and viewers,by the adjustment of social distance kept between them and deployment different shooting angles in horizontal and vertical axes.