A Multi-modal Analysis Of Apple’s 2013 Video Advertisements

Ever since its emergence in the 1990 s, the Multi-modal Discourse Analysis or MDA has attracted the attention from the researchers in various academic fields. As the products of the age of new media, online commercial has become an increasingly popular channel of promotion. Against this background, this thesis analyzes the online video advertisements of Apple’s 2013 products under the MDA framework.After the publication of Kress & van Leeuwen’s book in 2006, a lot of researches have been conducted. For example, O’Toole’s(1994) application of MDA in the field of arts and R. Barthes’ s(2006) analysis of the relationship between image and language. But to a large extent, the earlier studies tend to be focused on the static discourses. And the studies on the dynamic is still a field of study with great potential,which is one of the main reasons why the online advertisement videos are chosen as the subject of this thesis. As online videos by nature must be dynamic discourses and they also contain various modes like image, color, and actions, they are ideal subjects for the study of MDA.Due to the transient nature of the dynamic discourses, the ads are transcribed into fifty-two individual pictures to facilitate the study. Based on the framework of Visual Grammar or VG proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen, the videos are transcribed into representational, interactive and compositional meanings to find out how the various modes are utilized to attract consumers. This thesis also conducts a synthetic analysis of the video, exploring with examples how various modes are integrated to generate an intended meaning.This thesis has arrived at several conclusions. Firstly, the content of the ads video can be divided into static images and dynamic videos. Through the analysis of the representational meaning, it is found that in the dynamic discourses, the narrative processes tend to prevail, while in the static discourses, most processes are conceptual ones. Secondly, modality plays a vital role in the ads video. And it is concluded in the interpretation of the interactive meaning that due to the nature and objective ofcommercials, the advertisement discourses tend to use more persuasive acts and modes instead of the demanding ones. Finally, there is also a conclusion in terms of the verbal-image relationship. The verbal and image discourses correspond to each other very well so that a complementary relationship rather than a non-complementary one is formed.