Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Environmental Protection Public Welfare Posters From The Perspective Of Ecolinguistics

With the development of science and technology,the realization of the meaning of human communication is no longer limited to traditional single verbal mode,but increasingly relies on the joint participation of multiple modes such as images and sounds.A poster is a multimodal discourse composed of language and images,which can be analyzed from a multimodal perspective.Previous studies have mostly focused on movie promotional posters,with limited analysis of environmental and public welfare posters.This thesis will take this as the research object.This thesis is based on Halliday’s System Functional Grammar and Kress & van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar and combined with He Wei’s ecoosophy of “Diversity and Harmony,Interaction and Co-existence” to explore the features of modal meaning construction in public welfare posters.Taking environmental public welfare posters from WWF and Greenpeace websites as research objects,a quantitative and qualitative multimodal discourse analysis is conducted,aiming to study how meanings of environmental public welfare posters are constructed through verbal and visual modes under the guidance of ecosophy to achieve the goal of improving people’s ecological awareness.The major findings are as follows: At the verbal mode,interpersonal meaning accounts for the largest proportion,followed by ideational meaning.In interpersonal meaning,it is mainly achieved through two aspects: mood and modality,with mood being the main aspect.The main reason is that the environmental protection public welfare posters are designed to convey ecological and environmental information,hoping that viewers can take action to protect the ecological environment.In the ideational meaning,the use of material processes reflects the story state presented in the posters and the serious problems that the ecological environment is facing.The research also found that except for a few posters presenting ecologically destructive discourse,most of them were ecologically beneficial discourse,which can remind the audience that only when various species are diverse and harmonious in the ecosystem can they coexist and create a better ecological environment.As for visual mode,it is mainly achieved through three aspects: representative meaning,interactive meaning,and compositional meaning.In the sense of representative meaning,the action process and analytical process account for a large proportion.The main purpose is to present the dynamic ecological environment to the audience,which is to create the empathy and identity of the audience;In terms of interactive meaning,offer images are more frequently adpoted than demand images,indicating that posters tend to provide information about the ecological environment to viewers;The widespread use of close shot indicates that posters tend to establish an intimate social distance with audience,facilitate emotional communication,and take positive actions to protect the ecological environment.In addition,the use of more oblique perspectives and eye-eye angles enables the audience to have a more intuitive understanding of the information conveyed by images and establish an equal social relationship.In compositional meaning,the main information of the image is often placed in the middle,which is conducive to the viewer’s understanding of the poster content.When integrating He Wei’s ecoosophy of “Diversity and Harmony,Interaction and Co-existence” into the analysis of verbal and visual modes,it was found that posters are mostly ecologically beneficial when conveying text and image information.In brief,this thesis attempts to conduct a multimodal analysis of environmental public welfare posters from the perspective of ecolinguistics in order to improve people’s understanding of environmental public welfare posters and enhance their awareness of ecological protection.