On The Meaning Construction Of Visual-verbal Beverage Advertising Discourse

In the modern society featured visual culture, multimodal advertising has been oneof the major marketing strategies for commercial purpose and it plays an important rolein promoting products as well as stimulating consumption. Multimodal advertisingdiscourse constructs it meaning through a variety of semiotic modes such as language,image and sound, henceforth, it is vivid in form and rich in contents. As a primary formof multimodal advertising discourse, visual-verbal advertisements have increasinglyprofound influence on people’s life and consuming behaviors. Additionally,visual-verbal advertising discourse has become a hot issue in a lot of fields anddisciplines for its multimodal and cross-disciplinary characteristics.The present study attempts to analyze the systemic functional and metaphoricalmeanings of visual-verbal beverage advertising discourses. Under the systemicfunctional framework of Visual Grammar, this thesis first explores the metafunctionalmeanings of the visual elements in visual-verbal beverage advertisements; and then itintegrates Visual Grammar with intersemiotic complementary theory to examine theintersemiotic complementarity of compositional features, through which an elucidationcan be achieved on how visual-verbal beverage advertising co-deploys visual andverbal modes to construct a united and coherent discourse. Besides, with a view tocomplementing the current framework of multimodal discourse analysis and make itmore comprehensive and interdisciplinary, this research also discusses the feasibility ofanalyzing both the systemic functional and the metaphorical meanings within onesystematic system. To be specific, analyses on both metafunctional and metaphoricalmeanings are conducted under the systemic functional framework. A discussion on themetaphorical meanings of multimodal beverage advertisements is initiated to enunciatethe arising of visual metaphors by combining Visual Grammar and ConceptualMetaphor theory, while the interpretation of visual-verbal metaphors is investigatedfrom the perspective of image-language link.The research finds that visual metaphors are generated during the metafunctionalmeaning construction of visuals, while the mappings between image and language giverise to visual-verbal metaphors. It turns out it is possible to analyze the metaphoricalmeaning construe of printed visual-verbal advertising discourse under aninterdisciplinary framework integrating Systemic Functional theories and Conceptual Metaphor theory, which indicates the feasibility of exploring the systemic functionaland metaphorical meanings of visual-verbal beverage advertisements within onetheoretical framework.On one hand, this thesis verifies the applicability and explanatory power of VisualGrammar, proving that Visual Grammar is effective in interpreting visual-verbalbeverage advertisements; on the other hand, it enriches the scope of multimodaladvertising discourse analysis by probing into the metaphorical meanings ofvisual-verbal advertising discourses cross-disciplinarily. Meanwhile, an investigationinto systemic functional and metaphorical meaning construe also contributes to theimprovement of target audiences’ multiliteracy ability, which helps them betterunderstand visual-verbal beverage advertisements.