A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And Foreign Smartphone Video Advertisements

Nowadays, language itself is no longer the single discourse but has been combined with all kinds of nonverbal discourses such as, sound, videos, images and colors. Those nonverbal discourses are called multimodal discourses. The analysis of the single language discourse is not enough to make a systemic explanation of the meaning-making in the multimodal discourses, which makes the Multimodal Discourse Analysis(MDA) come into being. The MDA gives us a new way to analyze those multimodal discourses. Since MDA was put forward in the 1990 s, a lot of researches have been done in this area but most of them emphasize on the static discourses such as, cosmetic cover advertisements, paintings and movie posters. Researches about dynamic discourses are paid a little attention to for instance, the analysis of movie trailers and video advertisements on TV or on the Internet. And the contrastive study of those dynamic discourses between different countries are also very few. This research focuses on the contrastive study of one of those dynamic discourses---smartphone video advertisements(SVAs). In the previous researches, very few of them emphasize on the contrastive study of SVAs in the perspective of MDA. This research mainly focuses on the MDA of the serial video images of smartphone video discourse and the contrastive analysis between Chinese and foreign SVAs.This research selects 13 SVAs of six typical top international smartphone manufacturers in the world from 2013 to 2014, among which six SVAs are from three foreign smartphone manufacturers such as, Apple, Samsung and Nokia and seven SVAs are from three Chinese smartphone manufacturers like, Huawei, ZTE(Zhongxing Telecommunications Equipment) and Lenovo. Based on the framework of O’Halloran’s MDA of film text which includes both the single static visual images and various semiotic elements, all the 13 selected SVAs are divided into 400 video shots by using the video snapshots software--Hyper Snap, among which 200 video shots are from Chinese SVAs and another 200 video shots are from foreign SVAs. According to the Visual Grammar(VG) of Kress and Van Leeuwen, a quantitative analysis of those selected video shots is carried out in the view of three meaning-making ways of representational, interactive and compositional meaning. Meanwhile, a contrastive analysis is adopted to find out the similarities and differences between Chinese and foreign SVAs. Finally, case study is adopted as an approach to give detailed discussion by showing the similarities and differences of SVAs in the three meaning-making ways and analytic processes of MDA.Some major findings of this research are as follows. Firstly, in the view of representational meaning, both Chinese and foreign SVAs prefer using the narrative images. The difference is that the Chinese SVAs use more conceptual images. Secondly, by analysis of the interactive meaning, both the Chinese and foreign SVAs adopt a lot of offer acts, more close-up and eye-eye angles but the foreign SVAs adopt more offer acts, more medium shots, more oblique angles and low angles while Chinese SVAs use more demand acts, close-up, frontal angles and eye-eye angles than the foreign ones. Thirdly, in the perspective of compositional meaning, both Chinese and foreign SVAs prefer putting the key information in the center of an image, adopting the perspective to realize the salience and not using framing in their advertisements. The difference is that the foreign SVAs pay more attention to the center and adopt more perspective than that of Chinese ones while Chinese SVAs also arrange more key information on the left side of an image and adopt more color and size as well as the framing than the foreign SVAs.The significance of this research is to find out how the similarities and differences between Chinese and foreign SVAs are realized by the three meaning-making ways. This research also introduces SVAs as a new example of analyzing the complicated discourses and enriches the study of MDA in the dynamic discourse. By contrasting the Chinese and foreign SVAs, this research provides a good guidance for our Chinese smartphone manufacturers to make a more effective and suitable SVA for the international customers.