A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Rhetorical Appeals Of Chinese Public Service Advertisements

As advertisements are playing an important role in people’s social life, the researches on advertisement are richer and richer. Chinese public service advertisements are designed for spreading the positive energy, promoting ethics and social justice, and helping the mass to develop a scientific, rational and healthy life style. Nowadays, they are playing a vital role in the spiritual civilization construction and more researches have been conducted. However, compared with the study of commercial advertisement, the studies of public service advertisement are only a few,much less multimodal discourse analysis.The study adopts Aristotle’s classical rhetorical theory to analyze Chinese public service advertisement in multimodalities and aims to discover how Aristotle’s rhetorical appeals, i.e., ethos, pathos and logos, are realized in different modalities:verbal, image, format and auditory and how modalities integrate to realize the rhetorical appeals. It attempts to reveal the rhetorical appeals in Chinese public service advertisements and provide some help for the development of Chinese public service advertisements.Both quantitative and qualitative analysis are employed to describe and analyze the collected Chinese public service advertisements. First, the author collects statistics and makes five tables to show the distribution of rhetorical appeal employed in the Chinese PSAs, the distribution of the three rhetorical appeals in different modalities,i.e. image, sound and music, format and verbal, frequency of the emotions adopted in pictures of PSAs, frequency of figures of speech employed in Chinese PSAs and frequency of each value adopted in Chinese PSAs. Finally explanation will be given based on the results of the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the collected data.The findings in this thesis manifest that the three rhetorical appeals in Chinese public service advertisements are realized with different devices in multimodalties,among which visual and verbal modalities are used more frequently; among the three rhetorical appeals, pathos is utilized most in Chinese public service advertisements;all modalities integrate and cooperate together to realize the rhetorical appeals and then achieve persuasion in public service advertisements discourse.