Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis Of Modernity In The Bicycle Advertising In The Late Qing Dynasty

With the ongoing development of science and technology,non-verbal semiotic systems of the advertising such as image,color and sound are playing more and more important roles in daily communication.Advertising discourse can no longer be comprehensively analyzed from the perspective of verbal language alone.Based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL),Kress&van Leeuwen put forward the visual grammar theory,providing the theoretical foundation and analytical framework for multimodal advertising discourse analysis.Within the framework of multimodal critical discourse analysis,this thesis intends to explore the modern ideas behind the bicycle advertising in the Late Qing Dynasty from the perspectives of representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning.By applying the image-text relation summarized by van Leeuwen,this thesis also studies how the visual mode and the verbal mode jointly construct the modernity connotation in the bicycle advertising in terms of the visual mode,the verbal mode and the image-text relations in the Late Qing historical and social context.Taking the micro artifact,bicycle,as the starting point,this thesis adopts the qualitative method,selecting 25 bicycle advertisements(see Appendixes I&II)from 1868-1911 within The Late Qing Dynasty Periodical Full-text Database(1833-1911),The North-China Daily News&Herald Newspapers and Hong Lists(1850-1911),Ta Kung Pao(1902-1949),Sin Wan Pao(1893-1949)and The Tabloids Database(1897-1949)as the research data to conduct multimodal critical discourse analysis.Advertising in this thesis is defined in the broad sense.The bicycle advertising in this thesis is not confined to commercial advertising,but covers other types including bicycle posters,bicycle news pictorials and so on.Research samples which consist of both the image and the verbal text are mainly published in the commodity,transportation and notice sections of the newspapers in the Late Qing Dynasty.The major findings of this thesis are,three kinds of modern ideas implied in the bicycle advertising in the Late Qing Dynasty are revealed:gender equality,health notion,emancipation of humanity.There are also three kinds of image-text relations in this thesis:elaboration,extension,elaboration and extension.The most common image-text relation in the bicycle advertising of this thesis is“elaboration and extension".This finding indicates that the modernity implied in the bicycle advertising in the Late Qing Dynasty is jointly constructed by the visual mode and the verbal mode.Taking the historical and social context of the Late Qing Dynasty into consideration,this research concludes that the modernity connotation implied in the bicycle advertising in the Late Qing Dynasty promotes the emergence of modern consciousness and contributes to the change of ideology and lifestyle of people at that time to a certain extent.Moreover,the implications of modernity behind the bicycle advertising contribute to the transformation from the Late Qing society to the modern society hence exerting positive influence on China’s modernity process.