A Multiomodal Discourse Analysis Of Dynamic Tourism Advertisements

With the development of economy, the quality of people’s life has great improvement.More and more people have begun to seek spiritual satisfaction. Traveling, as a way to helppeople pursue spiritual satisfaction, is more popular among people. Meanwhile, tourismadvertisements as the best medium of tourist destination and tourism products and services,became the ground of where they go. Many scholars have done thorough researches onadvertising discourses in the perspectives of aesthetics, rhetoric, translation and functionalgrammar. They focused on the study of “language” in advertising discourses and paidattention to the study on the system of language, semantic structure, the relation betweenlanguage and social culture, or relation between language and cognition. However, not onlylanguage do other meaning semiotic resources such as images, sound, and color are used tomaking meaning. They have their own function in the process of meaning construction.Multimodal discourse analysis has come into being in1990s. It refers to the analysis oftwo or more or all of the different modes in a text or a communicative event. Dynamictourism advertisements, as a kind of discourse, possess the characteristic of multimodaldiscourse analysis, namely, the combination of several semiotic resources (language, imagescolor etc.) in making meaning. The present study takes Halliday’s Functional Grammar andKress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar as theoretical foundations, and uses themultimodal discourse analysis framework proposed by O’Hollaran and uses the framework ofThibault&Baldry to transcript dynamic tourism advertisement, regarding the frame as theanalytic unit.The present study selected30pieces of tourism advertisements as the analytic object andanalyzes them by using the proposed model: firstly, the verbal language is analyzed based onHalliday’s systemic function grammar; then, the visual images is analyzed based on Kress andvan Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar; lastly, by integrating the realization of the metafunctions ofverbal language and visual images, how verbal language and visual images work together torealize the three metafunctions and their relation are explored.To some extent, the present research makes the contributions to multimodal discourseanalysis and tourism advertisement in the point of theoretical and practical view. On theaspect of theory, the present research not only broadens the research field of the multimodalityand enriches the researching perspectives on tourism advertisements, but also verifies theexplanation of the multimodal discourse theory constructed by Kress and van Leeuwen ontourism advertisement discourse, proves the feasibility and applicability of the multimodaldiscourse. On the aspect of practice, the present research not only improves audiences multi-literacy ability, but also provides a new angle for audiences to understand dynamicadvertisements...