A Cohesion Study On Print Multimodal Commercial Advertising Text

With the development of science and technology, the traditional dominant role of languagein communication is challenged by other semiotic resources such as image, sound, and color etc.The non-linguistic semiotic resources combined with language, are playing a more and moreinfluential roles in daily communication and dissemination of information. Accordingly,traditional discourse analysis which takes language as the research object is inadequate andinaccurate. So Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA), a new perspective for accounting thesesemiotic changes comes into being in order to describe and explain the present semiotic changes.Obviously, traditional discourse analysis cannot meet the need of offering a comprehensiveaccount of different meanings carried by different semiotic modes. Kress&van Leeuwen (1996)come up with a visual analysis framework based on Systemic Functional Grammar to interpretimages in terms of representational, interactive and compositional meanings. This approach tomultimodal discourse provides us a powerful toolkit to account for meanings arising fromimages and the integrated use of the visual and verbal sources in print media.Meanwhile, advertising as an indispensable part in our daily life, is undergoing a change ofmultimodal trend, in which many social semiotic resources are involved. Naturally, MDA gainsmore and more attention in decoding the relations among the different modes. Traditionaladvertising discourse analysis focuses on the linguistic aspect of advertisements only, while otherexpression systems such as image, typology, sound and color are neglected. As the soul ofdiscourse analysis, cohesion studies on advertising discourse mostly concentrate on the linguistictext only before the emergence of Visual Grammar. The construction of VG proposed by Kressand van Leeuwen makes it possible to analyze multimodal advertising discourse. Based on theprevious studies on multimodal text cohesion, this thesis summarizes a tentative framework toanalyze the cohesion relations which exist in multimodal commercial ads, with reference to theSystemic Functional approach, and then analyzes visual and verbal modes in print commercialadvertisements within Kress and Van Leeuwen’s VG and Appraisal framework, aiming at findinghow the visual and verbal semiotics construe meaning and social reality into a meaning as wholeand how different social semiotic modes cooperate to produce synergistic effect in influencingthe consumers.This research validates the applicability and practicality of applying the cohesion theory ininterpreting the cohesive devices existing in multimodal commercial advertisements bycombining SFG with VG, and demonstrates how visual and verbal semiotic modes are sticked torealize the intention of advertiser. This research opens a new dimension for multimodal textcohesion study.