A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of CCTV Public Service Advertisements

Public service advertisements are cultural products formed under the background of a certain historical period.They mainly shoulder the responsibility of spreading socialist core values to the public,cultivating social moral values and promoting social integrity.Because of the ever-changing new media and technological innovations,the current public service advertisements have broken through the traditional single verbal mode.TV public service advertisements have mobilized the audience’s multiple senses with their rich modalities,thus capturing the viewers’ scarce attention.Therefore,it is worthwhile to discuss how to express the meaning of TV public service advertisements with multiple semiotic resources to achieve effective communication.Therefore,the appearance of multimodal discourse analysis at the end of the last century provides a theoretical basis and research framework.This paper adopts qualitative research method and combines theoretical basis with cases to conduct multimodal discourse analysis on CCTV public service advertisements.Firstly,we will analyze how the verbal text of CCTV public service advertisements realizes the three meta-functions of language from the perspective of the three meta-functions in systematic functional grammar;then,according to the visual grammar theory of Kress and Van Leeuwen,how the image realizes the three meta-functions will be discussed;Finally,the author will use the multimodal theory proposed by Professor Zhang Delu to analyze how modalities work together in detail.Through the above research,how CCTV public service advertisements use semiotic resources to work together to achieve effective communication will be concluded.Through research,it is found that the verbal modality constructs the image of the participants in the advertisement mainly through material process,relational process and mental process,and presents the world described in the advertisement to the audience;the statement is used to convey objective and specific information to the audience;the use of low and medium value modal operators is to narrow the distance between the producers and the audience and leave a certain space for the audience to think and evaluate;using the marked theme emphasizes on certain emotions or highlights certain information and so on.The visual modality conveys the dynamic fact through the action process and the reaction process,and uses the symbolic process to reproduce the symbolic meaning;the advertisement creator uses the four elements that realize the interactive meaning to influence the degree of the viewers’ intervention;the information to be emphasized generally improves its significance in the image,in order to focus on the viewer’s attention and so on.The modalities used in CCTV public service advertisements are not casually combined,but strictly adhere to the principle of complementarity to achieve the integration of meaning and to express the main purpose of public service advertisements.In other words,the operation of various modalities tactfully is to achieve effective communication.Through the interpretation of the meaning of CCTV public service advertisements,on the one hand,it enhances the audience’s ability to read and understand the public service advertisements and improves their advertising qualities;on the other hand,it also provides some reference for the producers of the advertising industry to enhance their subjective initiative.This study further shows that the research on public service advertisements based on the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis has strong applicability and feasibility.The completion of this paper also hopes to enrich the research of communication field.