A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of US Presidential Campaign Posters

The rapid development of media technology has changed the way and volume of information dissemination. Perhaps the most obvious change is the capacity of electronic media to transfer images, texts and voices through time and space to others who live in contexts far remote from our own. With the development of media technology-the emerging of information highways, the multiplication of TV channels, and the extensive application of mass media, words alone can no longer express meaning clearly, and texts transfer messages in different ways. That means, on the one hand, language is no longer the unique social semiotics, other social semiotics, including image, music, sound, color, gesture, began to transfer messages; on the other hand, besides texts, posters, movies and ads play a more and more important role in information dissemination in the21st century. Various social semiotics take part in and contribute to the meaning construction of discourse. Ranging from mass media to documents or books used in governments, corporations, universities, they all apply multiple modes-a combination of language, image, diagram and so on, crossing the boundaries between various arts or genres. Emerging alongside with those changes, the issue to be solved is how those multi-channels of communication enhance our ability to communicate? To cope with the problem, our average citizens are required to grasp a method of reading and analyzing various multimodal discourses. Here we call the method multimodal discourse analysis. As multimodal discourse can be found everywhere in our daily life and it has become an integrated part among our daily conversation. Therefore, it is necessary and of great significance to make a research on the multimodal discourse analysis approach.There are still research gaps in this area. Yet by far, multimodal discourse analysis still focus on the static images, posters are among the most frequently analyzed static images. While former studies on poster always concentrate on the commercial posters, such as movie posters, and the analysis angles of those posters are normally from an artistic perspective. The cultural posters and social-political posters are seldom touched on from the social semiotic perspective. Though there are some researches on US presidential campaign posters, the studies have always focused on only one or two posters, there is no systematic and comprehensive study.The campaign poster is characteristic of the social-political posters. In this thesis, the analysis will be based on multimodal discourse analysis to analyze20US presidential campaign posters. The thesis aims to find out how visual meanings achieved through various modes and how different modes correlate with each other based on visual grammar. The campaign posters exert a substantial effect on the voting behaviors, and the spread of campaign posters can profoundly alter the world arena since it can expand horizons and change the voting choices of mass electorates, particularly in the media intensive advanced industrial democracies, like US. Just for these reasons, the study has great significance both theoretically and practically.The present thesis has made a multimodal discourse analysis of US presidential campaign posters. For the aspect of application, this thesis constructs an analysis framework which analyzes various social semiotics altogether, it involves various multimodal systems and the changes of these system in the process of meaning construction; and at the same time, it also explains how the texts or verbal messages in the posters function as a complementary to the visual images. It has been proved that as two major modes appeared in US campaign posters, messages and images co-exist to construct an integrated meaning effectively. The thesis has several limitations, and the major one is that it leaves out some modalities.