Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Public Service Advertisements

Incorporating Hallyday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, and Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar, the author of this thesis tentatively analyzes PSAs as multimodal discourses and hopes to find out how the visual image, verbal text and other semiotic modes in PSAs construe meaning and construct social reality and how various social semiotics, especially image and language, cooperate and combine together to produce a synergistic effect in influencing the audience’s behavior in PSAs.The research methodologies employed in this thesis are descriptive analysis which combines the theoretical studies with the corpus analysis, and qualitative analysis. In Chapter three, several ads are given as examples to analyze the visual part of the PSAs from the perspective of Visual Grammar. The purpose of the theoretic analysis is to testify the applicability and practicability of Visual Grammar to PSAs. Besides, in Chapter four, one PSA is given to carry out a comprehensive and systemic study from the perspective of three metafunctions within each mode according to Visual Grammar and Systemic Functional Grammar. Interaction between the two modes is also studied based on the framework of Royce’s page-based intersemiotic complementarity and relevant image-language relation theories.Through the analysis of various public service advertisements, the present study testifies the applicability and practicability of Visual Grammar in the interpretation and illustration of PSAs nomatter they are deprived from abroad or at home. On the other hand, the present study also suggests a new approach---MDA in the interpretation and appreciation of PSAs, which aims to enrich the study on print PSAs and help better understanding of PSAs.Due to the author’s limited time and capacity, the research only involves the analysis of static image and language. The other semiotic modes such as the typography, music and dynamic images are neglected. Thus, the author hopes the study of other semiotic modes and further exploration of how these different semiotic resources work together to construct meaning will be made in the future.