Anti-Domestic Violence:Multimodal Meaning Construction In Public Service Advertisements As Public Legal Education Discourse

The Fourth Plenary Session of the 18 th CPC Central Committee held in Beijing from Oct.20 to 23,2014 set up an overall target to form a system serving socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics and build a country with socialist rule of law.Since then,public legal education has been laid great importance.Accordingly,scholars also pay more and more attention to it and conduct lots of research from different perspectives.In the past,newspapers,leaflets,pamphlets with mono-mode—verbal language are the main carriers to transmit legal information to the public.But with the emerging and development of multi-media,multimodal ones with verbal text,image and sound integrated become the mainstream,such as advertisements,animations and so forth.Thus,it's necessary to conduct research on this new-type public legal education discourse.This paper mainly explores one of them—Public Service Advertisement.Extending from Systemic Functional Linguistics which holds a view that language is a semiotic resource to construct meanings,Multimodal Discourse Analysis considers that other modes are also semiotic resources to have meaning potential like verbal language.This paper takes 16 static and 4 dynamic PSAs on anti-domestic violence as its research object and examines the construction of ideational and interpersonal meanings in the PSAs based on Systemic Functional Linguistics,Visual Grammar,evaluative meanings based on Visual Appraisal and image-text relations based on Martinec's theories.The analysis reveals that:(1)In terms of ideational meaning construction,verbal texts in the PSAs are generally very concise.The image pays more attention to the facial expression,gestures of the represented participants and the circumstance.In terms of interpersonal meaning construction,verbal texts in the PSAs mostly are plain to directly demand those suffering women to get out of domestic violence bravely.Few are narrative to offer information to viewers.Besides,eye-contact of the represented participants,shot and angle of the image are all frequently used to influence the viewers.The color and the circumstance are sometimes used to evoke viewers' emotion.In terms of image-text relations,three kinds of relations are discussed in the anti-domestic violence PSAs.(2)In terms of evaluative meaning construction in the anti-domestic violence PSAs,the depicted women's tears,bruises on their faces,their painful expression and their gesture(huddling up)are often used to inscribe a negative [affect: misery],which easily arouse viewers' sympathy to them.The depicted men's ferocious expression and their cruel behaviors to the women are used to inscribe a negative [affect: anger] which can evoke viewers' condemn to the men.In this way,the producers succeed to evoke viewers' resentment towards domestic violence and further appeal to them to fight against domestic violence together.(3)Education background of the viewers has an important influence on the degree of their understanding of PSAs.The higher it is,the more viewers can understand and less time it takes for them.Besides,proper use of eye-contact of the represented participants,color and shot in PSAs can achieve more in the effects of public legal education.This thesis applies Systemic Functional Linguistics,Visual Grammar and Visual Appraisal to the multimodal analysis of anti-domestic violence PSAs,a kind of public legal education discourse,which aims to deepen the public's understanding of this type of multimodal discourse so that make some contributions to public legal education to some extent.