| With the advent of the digital age,multimodality in communication is becoming more and more prominent,and the ability to understand and use multimodality has become a must.Posters,as a kind of multimodal media,are still one of the essential ways to promote with distinctive theme,strong visual impact and wide influence in communication.For instance,there are a large number of posters used for the promotion of the 15 th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity(COP15)held in Yunnan in 2021.The conference is the first global one on the theme of ecological civilization organized by the United Nations and aims to develop a global framework for biodiversity conservation.With the population growth and the expansion of human economic activities,biodiversity is facing serious threats.Necessarily,it is urgent for human beings to protect biodiversity and build the consciousness of a shared future for all life on Earth.A total of 77 COP15 posters are collected as the research subjects,and based on the methodology of multimodal content analysis,cluster analysis and Royce’s intersemiotic complementarity,this study attempts to explore how the posters present the consciousness of a shared future for all life on Earth,which involves three issues to be specifically discussed:(1)What is the distribution of modalities in COP15 posters?(2)How are the multimodalities constructed in COP15 posters?(3)How do the multimodalities in COP15 posters interact to represent life community consciousness?The results of the study are as follows:First,COP15 posters are dominantly used with visual modalities and verbal modalities.The visual modality is dominated by logos and icons,which are mostly presented in black and white with small sizes.However,photographs and drawings are the key types of image presentation.Most of the photographs and drawings occupy the whole poster and are brightly colored as a way to attract the eye.The verbal modality is the most frequent use of key terms to present the basic information about the COP15 conference.It is written mostly in black and white,in small font sizes and with sans serif fonts preferred.Since COP15 is an international conference,language on the poster takes the important role,but the language on the COP15 posters is mostly in Chinese with English as a supplement,which might be a weak point of the poster design.Second,with the cluster analysis of multimodalities in the posters,it has been found that the COP15 posters have the largest clusters of visual images and their colors are mostly chromatic.The verbal clusters in the posters present their importance in different fonts,font sizes and colors.Interestingly,the COP15 logo and the basic information about the conference are presented in each poster,all on the top left or right corner of the poster.In contrast,the names of poster organizers are at the bottom of the poster,often on the bottom left or right corner,and their cluster sizes are all small.Third,the relations between verbal and visual modalities are repetition,meronymy and collocation,which are manifested as reinforcement of address and attitudinal congruence.Multimodalities in the posters are constructed due to information value,degree of framing,and salience.On a whole,the COP15 posters are composed mostly with the center-margin structure,placing the image to the center of the poster and the texts at the periphery.The texts mostly overlap with the image,with no dividing lines or empty space.A poster can have more than one salient element,and there can be more than one reason for an element to be salient.The study is not only a try of application of Multimodal Discourse Analysis into the research of conference posters about ecological civilization,but it may provide reference for the design of some other posters,and help people better understand the implied meaning of the COP15 posters,so as to promote the dissemination of the conference content and the concept of ecological civilization. |
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