Developing An Analytic Model Of Visual Rhetoric For Chinese Pro-Environmental Posters

The pro-environmental poster,as a new multi-semiotic eco-publicizing genre,has increasingly become a crucial medium for institutions to carry out public education on ecological protection,as well as an important channel for institutions to disseminate ecological knowledge,advertise the hazards of climate change and publicize green strategies.Hence,this new medium has increasingly become prominent in environmental communication.Compared with traditional posters,it brings challenges to designers in the form of a wider and diverse viewership and the potential for more knowledgeable,universal and educational publicizing contents,each of which determines its special generic attributes.In the new visual context,poster-makers thus need to rely on particular semiotic resources and rhetorical modes,to meet the rhetorical purpose of pro-environmental poster genre.Visual rhetoric in pro-environmental posters has been under-explored.The previous relevant research has pointed a dearth of studies on visual environmental communication,and actually few investigations of visual persuasion in eco-posters can be found.Moreover,the existing research on visual rhetoric pays more attention to a single aspect of visual figuration,structure or argument,and its lack of a comprehensive research on multi-dimensional factors that affect visual rhetorical expression,such as generic structure,semantic division of labor and semiotic afforded meaning change.This dissertation fills these gaps by uncovering how semiotic resources are orchestrated to achieve the visual rhetorical purposes in this genre from the systemic-functional perspective.It is the first attempt to investigate visual rhetoric in this new multi-semiotic eco-publicizing genre concentrating on the following three major aspects,namely,a)semiotic(re-)contextualization,b)visual semantic structure,and c)generic elements that affect visual persuasion.An integrative approach,with a corpus-based semiotic analysis assisted by an emic analysis of blog comments,was used to triangulate the present investigation.Specifically,the semiotic analysis employs systemic functional theories of social semiotic concepts,systemic ordered typology,logico-semantics and generic structural potential(GSP)as well as some crucial developments of the SFL framework,such as rhetorical structural system(Matthiessen & Teruya,2015)and generic phase system(Martin & Rose,2008),to analyze the data in poster corpus.These are adopted to investigate: 1)what homo-systemic or hetero-systemic semiotic resources designers(re-)contextualize in the posters and how they rhetorically connect them,2)how visual structure is signaled and realized by rhetorical semiotic nexuses in the data and 3)how they seek to manage persuasion by weaving visual rhetorical phases in the data.The corpus-based semiotic analysis is tested by the emic analysis of blog comments involved in blogging ecological publicizing texts and posters.The focus concerns the theme of rhetorical responses to the blogging contents from the viewpoint of discourse decoders.The corpus-based research findings present as follows:Firstly,the corpus-based semiotic analysis reveals the motivated semiotic systems,by which designers rework the conventional signs as new rhetorical ones presented in pro-environmental posters.The motivated affordance to rework signs and foreground ecological concepts is a characteristic of more rhetorical signs than was appreciated previously.Poster-makers adjusted the iconic and contiguous effectiveness of semiotic choices with more indexical icons and iconic indexes to support dissemination that shows eco-publicizing to be extensively objective and similar to the present status of physical environment.The systemic-ordered typological analysis of semiotic affordances also uncovered the fact that iconicity of signs is not only a dynamic semiosis between sign vehicle,referent and sense,but also a homo-systemic or hetero-systemic affordance correlation between different signs,especially the motivated couplings between signifieds and signifiers.This also suggests the(re-)contextualized or foregrounded semiotic affordances assist in extending the rhetorical situation and strengthening semiotic persuasiveness of the holistic multi-semiotic meaning-making.At the same time,the semiotic re-contextualization analysis indicates the presence of the system of rhetorical semiotic configurations of how poster-makers connect the systemic-ordered semiotic addordances in the design practices,as well as their functions to represent the ecological knowledge,locate the social identities of environmentalists and intensify the inter-semiotic coherence for poster texture.In addition,designers were sensitive to the homo-or hetero-systemic ordered affordance interaction and adopted rhetorical incongruities and visual cohesion that engage viewers to achieve their expectant purposes.Secondly,the corpus-based systemic-structural analysis demonstrated the rhetorical relations of how designers signal visual structure.Specifically,visual rhetorical relations function as pre-realizational resources with a larger proportion of identification,elaboration,solutionhood and projection relations than others to frame the visual ecological publicizing situation.The corpus results showed while poster-makers tended to deploy elaborating and enhancing nexuses,they were more adaptable to rhetoric-making in terms of their open and close rhetorical motivations,i.e.,the constraints and effects of nucleus or satellite clusters.Moreover,nucleus constraints seem to be embedded by a recursive construing process,from the issues involved in environmental facts,to the strategies that should be adopted,and then to the calls for public attention to those environmental issues and green actions.Thirdly,the genre-staged intention analysis demonstrated the rhetorical phases that influence the management of generic sub-intentions and the deployment of persuasive resources when instantiating the eco-publicizing genre.Poster-makers were not directly imposing their ecological arguments on viewers to persuade them that green actions are compulsory to take,but making use of stable and variant generic stages,semiotic nexuses and semiotic homo-systemic or hetero-systemic ordered incongruities to engage wider viewers into the persuading progression between semiotic,ontological,public and meta-rhetorical intentions.The results revealed the necessity to present thematic context and relevant description,actual environmental phenomena,as well as ecological comments and awareness,which focus on engaging and persuading their public viewers.These frequencies and phase patterns of managing generic sub-intentions indicated a clear association between rhetorical meaning-designing and ecological conventions,influenced by the explicit motif granted to designers and their ecological frame-making practices.They also illustrated possible relevant motivations above,around and below the phases for influencing the generic structural stability.The emic analysis of blog comments illustrated 3818 viewers‘ rhetorical responses to the pro-environmental texts and posters in blogging,reflected by the main effectiveness and its five sub-effective categories with their concepts.The main effectiveness ’visual persuasion from blogging’ consists of five sub-effective categories,namely,engaging the topic,(re-)contextualizing blogging contents,reacting to meta-rhetoric,expressing views,and behaving selves.Specifically,online readers focused their rhetorical attention on the digital affordances of weblog,shared awareness and epistemic stance,clear personal feelings,expressions for solutions,causes and issues,etc.The rhetorical perceptions of bloggers are thus multi-dimensional from motivated signs to generic structure.The results also revealed the rhetorical strategies of what influences the motif(blogging purpose)and how to constue this motif.They therefore support again the corpus results that visual rhetoric depends on the semiotic resources ’from below‘(signs and their semiotic affordances),’from around’(multi-semiotic synergism)and ’from above’(multi-semiotic GSP).Through seeking to account for multi-dimensional characteristics of visual rhetoric in the visual publicizing genre from the systemic-functional perspective,the current investigation has presented fine-gained descriptions of visual rhetoric at the local and global levels of meaning-making,showing that systemic-ordered semiotic frames and logico-semantic constructs always impinge on the persuasiveness of the multi-semiotic eco-publicizing genre.It also makes an original contribution to how homo-and hetero-systemic ordered incongruities of semiotic potentials,constraints and effects of semiotic clusters as well as generic phases predicated at different rhetoric-making levels,influence semiotic deployments in pro-environmental posters.This ground-breaking exploration thus encourages us to gain insights into how visual rhetoric is signaled not only by examining semiotic hybridization at the micro-level but also by investigating both inter-semiotic or inter-cluster division of semiotic labor at the meso-level and(in)variant generic structural elements at the macro-level.The research processes and findings also assist in reflecting on the current systemic-functional multimodal discourse analysis(SF-MDA)research and providing significant recommendations on conducting studies in similar fields.To summarize,this dissertation has theoretical,methodological and applicational implications for the investigation of visual rhetoric-making and multi-semiotic synergy in pro-environmental poster genre.In terms of theoretical implications,they are threefold: a)to extend SF-MDA to the visual rhetorical analysis;b)to provide more robust definitions of visual rhetorical features and novel analytic frameworks;and c)to make a significant contribution to the rhetorical study of visual environmental communication and visual incongruities.The methodological contribution is to illustrate how to adopt multi-semiotic corpus analyses in tandem with an emic analytical approach,triangulating the methodology to provide invaluable insights for future work on exploring visual rhetoric with an integration of different empirical methods in visual discourse analysis from different research paradigms rather than just concentrating on the corpus-based methodology.In terms of applicational implications,the research is significant to those working in the field of creating new multi-semiotic eco-publicizing genre.It offers hints for sign-designing practices and makes several crucial contributions to mapping out more rhetorical design strategies,and will improve the persuasiveness and effectiveness of the eco-publicizing texts in turn.