多模态话语符际互补作用下的整体意义建构——以服务类产品平面广告为例

CHAPTER ONEINTRODUCTION

1.1 Research Topic

Modern society has been saturated with advertisements in all walks of life. No matterwe go on the streets or stay at home watching TV, there is a flourishing commercialcampaigns. In terms of commercial advertisements, the ones with more than the formof words are so common that we even don’t notice. Businessmen try great effort tomake their products known by more people, but in this era of information expansion,how to catch eyes of potential customers has always been an important issue onagenda. It seems that advertisements with various forms such as words, pictures,music, etc. are better to arouse attention, because of the vivid presentation of formsother than words only. However, also because of the influx of abundant information, itmakes the promoting cost higher and higher in order to make their products prominent.In this case, print advertisements are greatly favored by many businessmen. They costless to produce than television ads do, but with the application of both words andpicture, there is lots of potential to be innovative. There is a need to understand thedynamics of meaning making in this type of advertisement.

In accordance with social and technological development, analysis of discourseis no longer confined to that of language in traditional perspective. Multimodaldiscourse analysis is a new perspective of discourse analysis which has been thrivingover the past 25 years. It is roughly begun with the interpreting of image, when VisualGrammar was brought out to make a systemic approach to this interpreting.Concerning its function in reading business discourse, this grammar has been provedeffective to read images in a page-based advertisement. However, as a matter of fact,there is a greater need to investigate what a piece of advertisement as a whole aimingto convey and promote and how it takes effect in persuasion. Until now the workingmechanism of this image-text relation has not been clearly known. Therefore, takingthe perspective of multimodal discourse analysis could be meaningful to understandthis category of commercial campaign.

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1.2 Significance and Rationale of the Present Study

Since 1990s researchers in the field of discourse analysis have started to realize thelimitations of analysis of single linguistic mode when images or sounds are alsocombined to build up discourses. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar is found tobe applicable to multimodal discourse analysis, based on which Kress and VanLeeuwen’s Visual Grammar was brought up to interpret visual images. However, mostof the applications of these theories are individual non-linguistic modes. Analysis ofmultimodal discourse as a whole requires further consideration and study.

Print commercial advertising discourse is gradually taken as the research objectin the field ofdiscourse analysis, but these ads are more often analyzed in terms oftheir lexical, grammatical and stylistic features and their social effects as well,ignoring other modes such as images and sound which perform as a complementaryor even major role in constructing advertising discourse. Furthermore, inter-relationsbetween different modes are seldom explored in print commercial ads to find out whaton earth is running the gear of a successful advertising discourse.

Trying to validate Royce’s intersemiotic complementarity theory in image-textrelations of print commercial advertising discourse, this paper chooses serviceproducts commercials as its research object. It is rational because the non-physicalproducts require a distinct way of revelation from physical ones and the advertisingwords also do the same way. Thus we could see how the intersemiotic effect takesplace when the advertisers make this category of print commercial ads.This paper is theoretically significant in verifying the applicability and

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CHAPTER TWOLITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Previous Studies on Multimodal Discourse Analysis

“Since a concentration on words alone is not enough in understanding meaning insocial practices, we need a discipline to explain the meaning making practicesbecause language is increasingly becoming only one of the many semiotic resources”(Wei Qinhong, 2009: 146). Therefore, there is the necessity to do discourse analysis interms of multiple modes. Firstly the definitions of modes and multimodality will beinterpreted.

2.1.1 Modes and Multimodality Defined

According to Forceville (2009:22), Mode can be simply defined as “interpretablesemiotic system through specific perception process”. In this way classification ofmode can be related to five perception processes, i.e. 1) image and visual mode; 2)sound and auditory mode; 3) olfactory mode; 4) gustatory mode; 5) tactile mode.However, under real-scene communication circumstances, communication forms areoften mixed up with modes. For example, both written language and gesture belong tovisual mode; oral language, music and other kinds of sound all belong to auditorymode. This leads to infinite classification of modes (Zhao Xiufeng, 2011). For thesake of research, Forceville (2009: 23) classifies Mode as nine types, i.e. 1) pictorialsigns; 2) written signs; 3) spoken signs; 4) gestures; 5) sounds; 6) music; 7) smells; 8)tastes; 9) touch. This paper will follow Forceville’s classification of modes.

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2.2 Previous Studies on Advertising DiscourseAnalysis

Advertising discourse has hitherto been one of the main subjects in discourse analysis.This is partly because of its prevalence and social impact in people’s life. One of themost complete compilations of works in ads study would be Cook’s (2008) Thelanguage of Advertising. He collects and reprints articles and chapters from manyother scholars and himself, covering analysis of both monomodal (linguisticcommunicative mode) and multimodal discourse. Barthes (1977) examines therelation between language and images in an advertisement for Panzani pasta,“dwelling in particular on how words are used to delimit the signification of images”(Cook, 2008: 2). Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996) apply their visual grammar in“reading” print ads of foods, clothes, cars, etc. among many other pictures. Forceville(1996) discuss words and images work together to create “pictorial metaphor” in printads, which tends to be cognitivism rather than functionalism. Cook (2001) presentsways of presenting and understanding the interplay of pictures, music, speech andwriting in television ads. Using digital technology, O’Halloran (2005) demonstratesthe SF-MDA approach through the analysis of ideational meaning in a print ad ofpublic service.

Drawing on foreign research findings, domestic researchers attempt to interpretand understand the advertising discourse through applying the SF-MDA approach.The research objects include television ads of public service (Chen Yumin, 2008;Wang Jin & Zhu Yanran, 2011), television commercial ads (Lai Haiyan, 2010; QianYunran, 2011; Jiang Ting, 2012), print commercial ads (Hu Dan, 2007; Peng Yi &Yang Haiyan, 2010), print ads of public service (Kong Yanan, 2009), videocommercial ads (Liu Xiaolin, 2011). However, quite few writings concerning theimage-text relations has been done on print commercial ads, especially ads of serviceproducts which can be more and more significant in modern economy.

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CHAPTER THREE THEORETICALFRAMEWORK.........17

3.1 Systemic Functional Grammar....17

3.2 Visual Grammar........... 18

CHAPTER FOUR RESEARCH PROCEDURES.............27

4.1 Methodology and Data Collection...............27

4.2 Specific Procedures....................28

CHAPTER FIVE A CASE STUDY OF THE CONSTRUCTION OFINTEGRATED MEANING EFFECTED BY ISC............31

5.1An Intersemiotic IdeationalAnalysis of the Service Metrics Ad.................... 32

5.1.1 Representational Function of the Visual Image in the Service MetricsAd..............32

CHAPTER FIVEA CASE STUDY OF THE CONSTRUCTION OFINTEGRATED MEANING AFFECTED BY ISC

5.1An Intersemiotic IdeationalAnalysis of the Service MetricsAd

In this part the author will testify the proposition that ideational meanings in bothverbal and visual modes relate lexico-semantically to each other through theintersemiotic sense relations of repetition, synonymy, antonymy, meronymy,hyponymy and collocation, in the genre of the advertisement from Service MetricsGroup.

5.1.1 Representational Function of the Visual Image in the Service Metrics Ad

The picture of this ad is a naturalistic picture depicting a man being chased by a sharkin the sea, and he is swimming with effort to survive. Though this scene which iscomputer-enhanced does not exist in reality (it’s rare for a man with business suitswimming in the sea to survive a shark and photographed by others), it bares theideology of the picture designer. According to Kress & van Leeuwen’s visualgrammar, this is a narrative process, in which the vector is directed to the man fromthe shark. And in the following the Represented Participants, Processes andCircumstances will be identified.

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CHAPTER SIXCONCLUSION

The analysis carried out in this study has shown that, a metafunctional interpretationof the visual-verbal intersemiotic relations in a multimodal discourse is an effectiveway in interpreting how these intersemiotic relations are realized. The author beginsthis paper with the review of previous literatures on multimodal discourse analysis.Halliday’s systematic functional grammar of language is proved to be applicable toother semiotic systems for he regards “language as social semiotic”, and the SFapproach to MDA has been further researched on by Kress and Van Leeuwen in theirvisual grammar. Hence, scholars like Barthes and Royce investigate the relationsbetween verbal text and visual image in their effect in constructing an integratedmeaning for multimodal discourse. Works on the inter-mode relationships are not asmature as those on single mode, but the promising area is attracting greater attention,and has been applied in analyzing discourse as advertisement, magazine articles (withsketch caricature and line graph), comics, etc. After the review of literature, atheoretical framework of this study is brought out, based on the previous researcheson this field. And in the analytical part, the author chooses an advertisement from aweb site service company Service Metrics as an illustration, revealing how theintersemiotic relations are realized to construct an integrated meaning. The majorfindings, limitations and suggestions for further study are stated in the following twosections.

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