| Public legal education discourse(PLED)is one important branch of legal discourse studies,which falls within the research domain of forensic linguistics.The ever-accelerated development of new media has been enriching the means of public legal education(PLE)and rendering PLED multimodal.Traditional means of PLE,such as brochures,posters,have gradually been taken place by new means,animations,cartoons,and micro-blogs for example.Generally speaking,traditional means of PLE merely adopts one mode,usually verbal language,in transmitting legal information while new ones depend on more than one mode.Nowadays many legal practitioners,judicial organs,and people who have a good understanding of law have begun to apply these means in conducting PLE.Some scholars have studied PLE from the perspective of law and studies on multimodality are confined to some general genres such as English textbooks,but few studies have focused on multimodality in PLED.Anti-pyramid-selling cartoons,as a means of transmitting legal knowledge on pyramid selling,combine verbal language and visual image and are designed to help viewers understand pyramid selling and prevent them from participating in it.This thesis,by examining anti-pyramid-selling cartoons,investigates what features and harm of pyramid selling such cartoons reveal and how they are used to persuade viewers not to participate in it based on a framework mainly built on the theories of Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL),Visual Grammar(VG),and Visual Appraisal(VA).The overall objective of this study is to examine whether these cartoons are effective enough in transmitting legal knowledge to the public.Meanwhile,according to the data and results we have got,we aim to give some suggestions on how to produce more effective cartoons with multimodal resources.The analysis reveals that:(1)Image and text in these cartoons both contribute to revealing what features and harm pyramid selling has.The visual image,in which some represented participants with various expressions and gestures are depicted,together with the text,informs the viewer that: 1)pyramid selling promises potential participants huge material interests;2)it targets acquaintances or those who dream of becoming wealthy overnight;3)the money is funneled to the top of the pyramid.(2)These cartoons achieve persuasion through modality and speech function of verbal language as well as some elements in image,social distance,and color differentiation for instance.The verbal and visual resources collaboratively establish interpersonal relations among represented participants in cartoons.The relationship between represented participants usually turns from familiarity or intimacy to estrangement.The color differentiation and visual graduation in these cartoons present differences between propagandists and potential p articipants and help viewers distinguish one from another and innocence from evil.In this way,the interpersonal relations between represented participants and the viewer are built.(3)As for image-text relations,the most frequent relation in terms of status is that text subordinates to image.This is because the text is usually related to a part of the image.The most common logico-semantic relation is extension.In some cartoons the text extends the image by adding some elements that are not covered by the image and sometimes is the opposite.(4)It is found that these cartoons are effective in transmitting legal knowledge based on the results of questionnaires.But they need further improvement in future cartoon production.For instance,cartoon producers should attach more importance to text in cartoons instead of being too dependent on image in their production.Finally,this study extends the application scope of SFL and VG by virtue of analysis of multimodality in PLED.It is expected to shed a light on future studies of PLED,which deserve more attention of linguists and semioticians.Meanwhile,it is conducive to PLE in the society and production of PLE cartoons in the future. |
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