Multimodal-Appraisal Analysis Of Public Service Advertisements

With the rapid advancement of science and information technology, it has come into a digital era where getting information via different means of multimedia has become a common way. Under such circumstance, mono-modal discourses are not capable enough to meet people’s demand and language is no longer the only way that constructs meaning. Multimodal discourse, including various social semiotic resources, such as words, sound, images, etc, emerges along with the time and gradually attracts the researchers’attention.People’s awareness towards public service increased remarkably as the society developed and standards of living improved. As a symbol of social civilization, Public Service Advertisement (PSA) plays an increasingly important role in serving the public well-being. It enjoys great popularity among the audience for its rich emotionality and effective expression, meanwhile, it has the function to promote the society to be harmonious and perfect. Furthermore, various attitudes and ideologies are embedded in PSA. So, it deserves more attention to dig them out. At present, most scholars study PSA from the perspectives of psychology, sociology, rhetoric, etc. The studies on static advertisement are more than dynamic ones and the analyses on advertising language are more than those of multimodal advertisements, which leaves a large space for Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA), since every semiotic mode is able to deliver information and express meanings.Based on these observations, this paper tentatively adopts Appraisal Theory (AT) to analyze visual and verbal resources under the frame work of Visual Grammar (VG) so as to explore how represented participants interact with the viewers through various social semiotics, how they align the viewers as well as influence their attitude, and how various semiotics reflect appraisal meaning. In this study, the evaluative resources of three dynamic PSAs will be respectively analyzed via AT under the four aspects of VG, namely, contact, social distance, attitude and modality. Next, the multimodal-appraisal characteristics and the dynamic effects of the three PSAs as a whole will be summarized. The present study is mainly based on the qualitative research method together with the descriptive method. After detailed analysis, the conclusions can be drawn as follows:The appraisal meaning of PSA comes from the speakers’ assessment and the viewers’ evaluation invoked by images. The verbal and visual resources in the frames of PSAs complement and expand each other to help realize persuasiveness. The shift of shooting angles contributes to the accomplishment of interactive meaning. Besides, AT and VG can be synthesized to analyze various semiotic modes in multimodal discourse, through which the interactive effect of PSA can be interpreted comprehensively. The significance and the value of the thesis lie in that it profoundly explores the emotion and evaluative resources of PSAs, and further analyzes the producer’s attitude and purpose. The study is one of the tentative attempts to integrate the framework of AT and VG, and testify the feasibility of using AT to evaluate visual resources.