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Systemic Semiotic Approach to Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Business Advertisements

Author: XuYanYan
Tutor: ZhangDeLu
School: Ocean University of China
Course: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: Systemic functional semiotics Multimodal Discourse analysis Visual Grammar Multimedia literacy
CLC: H052
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2010
Downloads: 571
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Abstract

In this new media age, literacy is not just a matter of language but a matter of motivated multimedia design. At the same time, image is displacing writing and moving into the center of communication. Kress considers the likely larger-scale social and cultural effects of that change, arguing that the effects of the move to image as one of the dominant medium of communication will produce far-reaching shifts in relation of power and not just in the sphere of communication. The democratic potentials and effects of the new information and communication technologies will have the widest imaginable economic and social consequences. In this respect, this shift enriches the scope of expression systems in communication and manifests the multimodal nature of communication. In light of this condition, a new paradigm for the analysis of discourses is formulated in 1990s, that is, multimodal discourse analysis. Multimodal discourse analysis is a set of practices which entails going beyond language as social semiotic and making use of two or multiple semiotic resources for meaning making. It is the aim of this paper to provide a detail analysis that best captures the multi-semiotic interaction between visual images and linguistic text in print business advertisements. In this historical context of global visual culture, multimodal research is of great significance in theory and practice.Business advertising is a kind of commercial advertising, which aims at making the public know some certain product better, affecting their opinions and attitudes toward some business activities, changing their behaviors and acts on some business innovation, and thus solving some economic issues. There are economic reasons for focusing on business advertising because they see it as a style that will attract advertisers. Apparently, market reform has been accompanied by the revitalization of business advertising as a means of promoting some commercial activities. Furthermore, good media reputation will increase the performances of global commercial entities. Thus, we choose business advertisements as our object of study. The data is collected from:(1) the website of business advertising; (2) American Time Magazine. Drawing upon Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996) visual Grammar based on SFL, the present study adopts a qualitative method through theoretical research and corpus analysis in hoping of making a clarification on how image as a social semiotic resource and language as a social semiotic mode work together in a business advertisement to generate synergy, create meaning and achieve the best persuasive effects, and meanwhile examining how BAs function as accelerators to improve the public economic awareness and influence people’s ideology.This thesis has introduced the theoretical framework of the semiotic approach to multimodal discourse analysis and validated the applicability and practicality of this study in interpreting business ads, which provides a new paradigm for producers of advertising discourse domestically. Practically, the necessary improvement on multimedia literacy will further unravel some implications for the elaboration of multimodal research and meet the opportunities that information explosion thrust upon the global citizen. Meanwhile, the historical context of global visual culture brings new challenges of "visual literacy" as a matter of survival for global citizenship, especially for people who engage in economy. Besides critical linguistic literacy, global citizen should be capable of Critical Visual Literacy so as to better discern the multimodal discourse saturated in the popular media.

Systemic Semiotic Approach to Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Business Advertisements

Abstract

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