| Nowadays,the ways for people to acquire information become multimodal,which means that except language and words,information is also acquired from social semiotics like pictures,videos,audios,cartoons.The meaning construction of discourse is based on the whole semiotic system,while traditional discourse analysis only focuses on language system and ignores semiotic resources,such as images,sounds,colors,which causes incomplete or even false analysis.Under this circumstance,mutimodal discourse analysis emerged.It integrates language with other semiotic resources.Its inclusion of values,relationships and combination meanings of all symbols increases the diversity and profoundness of discourse analysis,and makes the deep meaning of discourse be better dug up.As a kind of visual discourse,poster comprises of many symbols like color and words.It can achieve propaganda effects by conveying creator's intention delicately and directly.In recent years,some experts and scholars at home and abroad have made some analyses from multimodal perspective,but these analyses mostly focus on commercial posters,movie posters and tourism posters,etc.instead of political posters.However,as an extremely necessary propaganda means for campaigners,the multimodal studies on political poster should be brought to the forefront since it can help campaigners to build political image and convey political beliefs to the public.From June,2015 when Donald Trump announced to run for president,his campaign posters started to appear everywhere,so it can be said that campaign posters occupy a decisive position on his whole campaign process.Every poster is elaborately designed by designers,so the deep connotation behind them is worth to be investigated.As a way to make multimodal discourse analysis,visual grammar made by Kress and Van Leewen mainly focuses on visual discourse.With clear and complete frame,it had attracted much attention since it appeared.Developing from Halliday's three meta-functions,it also includes three parts: representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning.Based on visual grammar,this thesis analyzes Donald Trump's campaign posters by qualitative and quantitative analysis method.The meanings of verbal and visual mode are thoroughly analyzed,and the way they achieve propaganda purpose by constructing meaning as a whole is explained.By analyzing 20 campaign posters of Donald Trump,it is found that in representational meaning,the reactional process and action process are used most frequently;in interactive meaning,offer image,personal distance,frontal angle,eye level angle,high modality and sensory coding orientation are preferred;while in compositional meaning,information value of top and bottom is preferred,and salience and framing appear in all posters.These three meanings are related-every poster involves more than one aspect of these meanings.It is very useful and effective to analyze the connotation of campaign posters.Every poster is composed of two modes-verbal mode and visual mode,and the combination of them makes posters achieve the best propaganda function.The campaign posters of Donald Trump are successful and play a very important role in his election.In this thesis,the explanatory power of visual grammar for discourses like political posters is proved,which extends the range of application of this theory and demonstrates its high practicability and operability.However,this study also have some disadvantages such as strong subjectivity. |
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