A Contrastive Study Of The Compositional Meaning Of Chinese And English Public Service Advertisements From Perspective Of Multimodal Discourse Analysis

With the development of science and technology, multi-media are gradually applied inour daily life. So the way that people get the information is no longer limited to the text, theimage, sound, color, typography and other multimodal modes are also included, which to agreat extent enrich the communicative mode and the form of semantic expression. Traditionaldiscourse analysis can not satisfy the research of multimodal discourse, so multimodaldiscourse analysis (MDA), may overcome the limitations of traditional discourse analysis andprovide people a new perspective of discourse analysis.Public service advertisement (thereafter PSA), as a kind of form for propaganda, playsan important role in updating people’ mind and promoting the progress of the society, so it hasbeen paid great attention to by linguists. Traditional discourse analysis focused on thelanguage of PSA while ignored the meaning and function of visual modes. However, if wewant to fully understand the meaning of a PSA, what we should focus on is not only thelinguistic level but also the visual mode. Different cultures between China andEnglish-speaking countries must be embodied in the design of PSA, which may lead to thedifferences of language and image composition, and then makes people feel troubled inreading these multimodal discourses.In light of this condition, this paper adopts Kress&van Leeuwen’s (1996) theory ofvisual grammar and Royce’s compositional inter-semiotic complementarity as the theoreticalframework, which aims to make a contrastive analysis of the compositional meaning ofChinese and English PSA from the perspective of MDA and explores how language andimage work together in the PSAs, and at last tries to find out the cultural roots causing thesedifferences. The whole research is going to discuss the following questions: what are thesimilarities and differences in the construction of image meaning between the Chinese PSAsand English PSAs; what are the similarities and differences in the construction of textualmeaning through inter-semiotic complementarity between Chinese and English PSAs; whatare the reasons for the differences in compositional meaning between Chinese and English PSAs. The results show that:(1) Chinese and English PSAs turn to adopting text and imagemodes, from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis, there are some differences andsimilarities between these two kinds of PSAs because of the different cultures, namely itmainly reflects in the following three aspects, information value, salience and framing.(2)There still exist some differences and similarities between Chinese and English PSAs in theconstruction of textual meaning through inter-semiotic complementarity, which primarilyreflect in the information valuation on the page, salience on the page, degrees of framing ofelements on the page and potential reading paths.(3) The differences between Chinese andEnglish PSAs in the construction of image meaning and the construction of textual meaningthrough inter-semiotic complementarity are mainly affected by the following different culturalvalues: time orientation, collectivism and individualism, implication and direction.This paper makes a contrastive analysis of Chinese and English PSAs from multimodaldiscourse analysis, which expands the research space of the discourse analysis on publicservice advertisement. Meanwhile, the scholars paid little attention to the relationshipbetween various kinds of semiotic modes in the field of MDA. Therefore, the analysis of thevisual-verbal relations in PSAs is actually an exploration of MDA.