The Meaning Construction Of The Print Public Service Advertisement From Perspective Of Intersemiotic Complementarity

The modern society is an era of electronics and information. Verbal language isnot the only way people communicate. Image increasingly becomes an important toolin people’s communications, and can form a discourse conveying messages withverbal language together. The discourse made up of image, verbal language, and someother kinds of semioses is called multimodal discourse. In the multimodal discourse,visual and verbal semioses are not juxtaposed on the page randomly and conveyinformations independently but cooperate with each other to show the rich contents inexperiential world and establish interpersonal relationships.In recent years, the studies of multimodal discourses mainly aim at analyzingverbal mode or visual mode based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar orKress and Van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar, but the relationships between these twomodes do not receive much attention. Royce raised Intersemiotic ComplementarityTheory based on Systemic Functional Grammar and Visual Grammar. This theoryprovides a theoretical foundation to analyzing intersemiotic relations in multimodaldiscourse and makes up for the weakness in this field. The theory believes ideationalintersemiotic complementarity can be realized by repetition, synonymy, antonymy,hyponymy, meronymy, and collocation of two modes; interpersonal intersemioticcomplementarity can be realized by visual-verbal reinforcement of mood, attitudinalcongruence or attitudinal dissonance; the compositional intersemioticcomplementarity is integrated by information value，salience，framing, inter-visualsynonymy. and potential reading paths, then the ultimate meaning of the discourse canbe understood. The Intersemiotic Complementarity Theory can be used to interpretvarious of multimodal discourses, and the print public service advertisement (PSA forshort) is one of them.Print public service advertisement is a classic multimodal discourse, which canhelp solve social public problems, make socialist ideological and ethical progress. Theprevious studies of PSAs mainly concentrated on the verbal language, but ignored thevisual language and relations of the two modes. So, this thesis is engaged in studyingthe intersemiotic relations of the print PSAs. Due to limited length of the thesis, thethesis only selects a Chinese PSA and an English PSA for analysis, which suggests thegeneral applicability of the Intersemiotic Complementarity theory. Adopting the qualitative research method, this thesis mainly studies the twoadvertising cases by Royce’s Intersemiotic Complementarity. There are three steps inthe study. First, verbal resources are analyzed; then the visual resources are studied;last, relations and interaction of two kinds of resources are examined. The studytestifies the practicability and feasibility of Inter-semiotic Complementarity Theory ininterpreting pro-environmental PSAs. The study helps advertising designers make fulluse of characters and different social functions of verbal and visual sources andintegrate them effectively to design more and more successful advertisements; it alsohelp advertising viewers recognize advertisers’ thinking patterns and let thepro-environmental PSAs fully paly their effect.