A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Humorous Advertisements

With the arrival of the digital age and the wide application of the multimedia technology, communication means between people is no longer only by language but gradually multimodalized, including image, color, voice, gesture etc. This means that modern discourse analysis should pay attention to all kinds of semiotic resources systems. Multimodal discourse analysis, which started in the90s of the last century in the west, is a new approach to discourse analysis based on Halliday’s systemic functional grammar. It investigates how the two or more semiotic systems work together in the process of integrative meaning-making to create a complete discourse or communicative event.As a kind of discourse genre, a print humorous advertisement has the remarkable features of multimodal discourse, i.e., the mixed use of language, images, color, etc. The traditional discourse analysis of humorous advertisements focuses on the advertising language semiotic system and humor itself, but neglects the study of other semiotic systems. Thus, based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, Kress&van Leewuen’s Visual Grammar, and Royce’s Framwork of Inter-semiotic Complementarity, this thesis attempts to propose a model for the multimodal discourse analysis of humorous advertisements. Under the guidance of the model,20pieces of humorous advertisements are analyzed for the case studies, which aims to interpret how the multimodalities work together in integrative meaning-making to achieve the best persuasive effects through discussing the ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions of the verbal modality and the representational, interactive and compositional meanings of visual image modality in humorous advertisements. The analysis approach adopted for this thesis is a qualitative analysis of theory and corpus, and all the cases are collected from internet.This thesis has introduced the theoretical framework of the multimodal discourse analysis and verifies the applicability and feasibility of the theoretical framework in interpreting the meaning of English or Chinese humorous advertisements. The ways of expressing subjects of humorous advertisements are relatively subtle and vague, which require the designers and the viewers to have a high awareness and ability of multiliteracies. Therefore, this research is not only useful to the designer for using all kinds of modalities scientifically so as to achieve the best designs and expression effects, but also can help the viewers to read the subjects expressed by collaborative modalities comprehensively so as to enhance the viewers’ appreciation of humorous advertisements. This thesis consists of five chapters with the structure as following:Chapter1briefly introduces the research background, purpose and significance of research, research methodology, data sources and the organizational structure of the thesis. Chapter2reviews the discourse analysis of humorous advertisements and the Systemic-Functional multimodal discourse analysis. Chapter3illustrates the theoretical foundation of this thesis and proposes a practical model for the multimodal discourse analysis of humorous advertisements. Chapter4conducts a practical multimodal discourse analysis of20pieces of humorous advertisements for a case study to testify the applicability of the proposed model. Chapter5serves a summary of the whole thesis, including major findings and limitations of this study, offering the suggestions for future studies.