Research On Interpersonal Meaning Of Automobile Video Advertisements From A Multimodal Perspective

As a method to convey product information and company culture,video ads can convey the interpersonal meaning and affect customers’ purchasing preferences to realize the aim of persuasion.In recent years,more and more companies try to expand into the international market,and so does the automobile industry.Advertising one’s brand is one of the important steps to enhance a brands’ popularity when stepping into the international market.Based on the theories of Systemic Functional Language,Visual Narratives and the analytical framework of multimodal persuasive strategies proposed by Valeiras,J.,this thesis collects 30 English video ads from You Tube accounts of German,American and Japanese automobile brands and conducts a quantitative and qualitative study on the realization of the interpersonal meaning in automobile video ads,aiming to find out how automobile video advertising uses a variety of resources to establish interpersonal meaning to achieve different persuasive strategies and to offer practical suggestions for domestic automobile brands to design their automobile video ads.The findings show that in the distribution of linguistic resources,the most frequently used mood is declarative mood,followed by imperative mood and interrogative mood in automobile video ads.Low-value words of modality account for most of the usage in the samples,median value words of modality take the second place and the least frequently used are high-value words.When it comes to the classification of modality,low-value words of modality occupy the major proportion in probability,high-value words of modality account for most of the samples in obligation,and median value words of modality occupy the majority of the samples in inclination.In terms of the person system,the first-person accounts for the largest proportion of the sentences in automobile video ads,the second person ranks the second place usage,while the usage of the third person has the smallest proportion of the video ads.In the distribution of visual resources,the observed form occupies a larger proportion compared with the contact form in terms of interaction.As for perspective,the objective perspective is the main perspective used in the examples.In terms of pathos,the personalizing style is used most frequently in terms of engagement,while the appreciative style is not adopted in the automobile video ads selected.In addition,the alienating style also occupies a certain proportion and it always appears with the personalizing or empathic styles.In terms of ambiance,muted colors are adopted more frequently compared with vibrant colors in terms of vibrancy;warm colors are used more often compared with cold colors;nearly all of the video clips are naturalistic styles in terms of familiarity.In the usage of the persuasive strategies,the strategies of anticipation,emphasis and rapport are all used in the automobile video ads more or less.In terms of the anticipation,the visual resources occupy a larger proportion compared with the linguistic resources.As for the persuasive strategy of emphasis,the use of special declarative mood and alienating images can better highlight the content of the video.The collective pronouns and engaging images are the major approaches adopted in the persuasive strategy of rapport.This thesis further demonstrates the explanatory power of SFL and Visual Narratives on the realization of interpersonal meaning in automobile video ads and broadens their research scope to video ads.Besides,it proves that the visual resources are as important as the linguistic resources in terms of the realization of the interpersonal meaning.By analyzing the linguistic resources and visual resources in automobile video ads,it is hoped that the findings can enlighten Chinese automobile brands to create attractive video ads for international markets,thus can influence customers’ purchasing choices more effectively.