| With the rapid development of internet and cultural diversity in our modern society, more and more language symbols spring up in our communication with other people. People communicate with others in more ways in addition to language and texts, for example, they communicate with others through images, sounds, animated drawings, charts, colors, typography and so on. As Hu Zhuanglin puts it, as people step into a new multimodal society where the social symbols decrease, multi-literacy of multimodality should be paid much more attention to. Therefore, we should have an overall understating of the significance of the multimodality, which means that the previous study of analyzing language only can not meet the requirements and a new grammatical system is thus needed to be produced for a better understanding of the multimodal discourse.Under the influence of the multimodality in science technology and mass media, modes of advertisement are also changed in the same way at the same time. Traditional discourse analysis in advertisement is generally devoted to the analysis of texts, while such non-linguistic symbols as sounds, animated drawings and colors are often ignored. Since1990s, based on Halliday’s systematic-functional linguistics, the western scholars began to focus on the non-linguistic symbols of sound, animated drawings and colors instead of the traditional social symbols of language. Visual Grammar by Kress and van Lueewen, the most representative of them, laid a theoretical foundation for analyzing the multimodality in advertisement. Thus, this paper tries to analyze in depth the multimodality in advertisement based on Visual Grammar combined with Schema Theory, and discuss how images (a way of visual communication) interact with linguistic symbols to convey information and meanings, which may help people to understand in many ways all kinds of information and improve their abilities in their understandings of information in a certain degree.Through analyzing the social symbols of mutuality in the images and texts of perfume advertisements, this paper finds that analysis of this kind is more concise, direct and simpler than the traditional ways of analysis. With more highlights and sense of wholeness, the interaction of human beings with objects in an advertisement can achieve the best effect with more meanings. This paper analyzes several perfume advertisements based on Visual Grammar and Schema Theory when combining theoretical studies with corpus analysis, which embodies that the theory is applicable in multimodal discourse and it is better to embody the three metafunctions of Visual Grammar when combining non-linguistic symbols with linguistic symbols. Schema was first put forward by the German Philosopher Kant in1781in his work--The Criticism on the Practical Reason. He thought that only when a person could associate the new thoughts, new information and a new conception with the former information, could he get a real sense of the information. Schema is a way of representation and storage concerning a theme. Schema is what people need to learn and master in a lifetime, a unit of a large amount of knowledge. Different scholars have many different understandings of schema. Cook(1989,1994) thought it as the former knowledge or background information in people’s mind. Pearson thought a schema is an image or imagination of certain information in people’s mind. Rumelhart(1980) thought "Schema is the overall knowledge of a person"," everyone stores all kinds of schema or knowledge in his or her mind." All the above definitions have one thing in common in that schema is a kind of general knowledge of the world, input and then stored in people’s mind. Schema Theory was put forward by the British psychologist Bartlett in1930s. When people understand and absorb information, they need to associate the input information with the known information (or conception). Both the decoding and encoding of the newly-input information will be determined by the existing information schema, frame and network in people’s mind. The input information must be matched with this schema to finish the information processing, a process of taking in information, decoding, recombination and then storing. Texts of advertisement rely a lot on the readers’former precognitive schema. Advertisement is a special text type combining multiple media of characters, sound and images. Therefore, an advertisement is different from scientific texts and literature in that it is centered on readers. In order to arrive at the best result, an advertisement must be targeted at the readers and therefore meet their requirements. In a word, an advertisement must conform to the readers’former cognitive schema. A successful advertisement must attract the target reader’s attention, arouse the readers’interests, gain the readers’recognition and inspire the readers’desire to purchase. Therefore, realization of an advertisement in a large degree depends on the mastery of readers’ schema. As a way of multimodality and social symbols, advertisement can fully motivate people’s former schema in all aspects. Schema Theory reveals the input and output of information from the point view of cognitive psychology. The new information gained from the advertisements of the readers would integrate with the former information, to provide foundation for people’s cognition. This paper will analyze the multi-model advertisements through the interaction process of the schema theory and the visual grammar, aiming at appreciating the multi-model text much better and more comprehensively.For lack of perfect theoretical preparation, this paper may have some defects in some aspects. Firstly, the author may be subjective in grammatical analysis. Secondly, the interaction and supplementary effects of different modals may be hard to define. Above all, this paper is a study of the print ads, only concerning part of the Schema Theory. In future, it still needs further study for a better understanding of multimodality and linguistic symbols by Schema Theory. |
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