Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Advertisements From The Perspective Of Systemic Semiotics

In the era of visualization, advertisements of various shapes have flooded in our society. Modern advertisements are realized through many symbol systems, such as text, image, color and so on. Looking back to the study of advertising discourse analysis, we can find most researches focus on the text analysis. In light of this condition, the rise of multimodal discourse analysis provides new insights into the advertising discourse analysis.The research does the multimodal discourse analysis to interpret the advertising discourse. From the perspective of systemic functional semiotics, the print advertisements are formed by two symbol systems – image and text. The overall aim of the research is to explore how the advertising discourse expresses its meaning by the interaction of these two symbol systems. Qualitative, descriptive and interpretative methods are adopted in this research. Kress & van Leeuwen’ Visual Grammar is applied to analyze the meaning construction of the images in the advertisements respectively from the aspects of representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning. Following Martinec & Salway’s image-text status relations, the research tries to classify the advertisements into four types: image-text independent advertisement, image-text complementary advertisement, image subordination advertisement and text subordination advertisement. The research analyzes these four kinds of advertisements respectively to explore the interaction of the image and the text in each of them, and to interpret the meaning construction of each advertising discourse.By doing this research, we find that the image plays an important role in the meaning construction of the advertising discourse. It plays different roles in constructing meaning of the advertising discourse. For instance, it can form a kind of process to express the meaning of an advertisement; it can show the attitude of an advertisement to the viewers in different shot angles; it can also reveal the purpose of an advertisement by different layouts. The intersemiotic relations between the image and the text in the advertising discourse contribute a lot to the construction of the discourse meaning. The advertisements with different kinds of image-text relations have different ways of meaning construction. In addition, multimodal meanings of the advertising discourse are realized by the interaction of the image and the text. The viewers can interpret the advertisements from the analysis of the image, the text and the interaction of the image and the text.