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 of discourse 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 concentrati
