A Research On Persuasive Function Of Chinese Medicine Advertisements-from The Perspective Of Multimodal Discourse Analysis

The ultimate purpose of medicine advertisements is to convey information and achieve persuasion,so having the knowledge of how the persuasive function is realized in medicine advertisements is of great importance both for the advertisers and for the viewers.At present,the analysis of public service advertisements and cosmetic advertisements have sprang up quickly and brought fruitful results,but there are a few researches about medicine advertisements by means of multimodal discourse analysis.This paper focuses on the persuasive function of Chinese medicine advertisements from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis,especially from the perspective of interactive meaning.The persuasive function of medicine advertisements is analyzed from the perspective of interactive meaning,and the interactive meaning in the multimodal discourse can be realized through interpersonal meaning in verbal mode and interactive meaning in visual mode.So the medicine advertisements are analyzed from verbal mode and visual mode.In this paper the author collects 50 medicine advertisements from television,and the duration of each advertisement is less than 30 seconds.The collected medicine advertisements are all familiar advertisements and cover many common diseases,such as cold,cough and so on.The author use qualitative analysis to analyze how the interactive meaning of medicine advertisement is realized through verbal mode and visual mode and to achieve persuasive function in Chinese medicine advertisements and then find out the percentage of different theoretical methods.In the verbal mode,the interpersonal meaning is achieved through mood system,modality and person system and in the visual mode,the interactive meaning is interpreted through contact,social distance and perspective.Royce's inter-semiotic complementarity theory is also used to study how verbal mode combined with the visual mode in achieving interactive meaning.The findings of the study are as follows: in the verbal mode,the declarative mood is most frequently used mood structure,and the imperative is second frequently used one.The advertisers employ imperative clauses to give demand to people to make purchase action thus the persuasive function of advertisement can be achieved.As to the modality,the high value modal operator and low value operator are frequently used.As for the personal pronouns,the first person pronoun is frequently used,and the second person pronoun is second frequently used.As for the visual mode,the “offer act” image is frequently used in medicine advertisements.The offer images provide information to the viewers while the demand images ask the viewers to do something.In terms of social distance,the medium shot images are used more than close shot images and long shot images.In regard to the perspective,the frontal angle and eye-to-eye angle are most frequently used in order to achieve persuasive function.The Inter-semiotic Complementarity of advertisements is achieved through reinforcement of address and attitudinal congruence.Hopefully,this study can enrich the research on medicine advertisement,and help the readers or potential customers to see through or to be alert to the persuasive language as used in medicine advertisements,hoping the potential customers of medicine products will benefit from this research in adopting a wise consuming behavior,and also for the advertiser to make high quality medicine advertisements.