Abstract

With the rapid development of television advertisement and multimedia technology, a series of non-text semiotic such as image, color and sound, plays a significant role in real-life communication. Therefore, human communication and discourse forms are characterized by multimodality. In this paper, the visual grammar proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen is adopted for the analysis, which focuses on analysing the representation meaning, interactive meaning and the compositional meaning, discussing the internal mechanism of constructing advertisement discourse. Through this study, it is found that, firstly, video public service advertisement frequently conveys the representational meaning by narrative and conceptual representation; secondly, four elements of visual contant, social distance, perspective and modality work together to produce the interactive meaning, an image could be either demand or offer depending on the represented participant depicted in an image; thirdly, the information value and significance value are linked to each other in nature, however, they are not quite similar. In all, this thesis enriches the research of video advertisement discourse and provides a new perspective to interpret it.

  Key words:   multimodality; representation; interaction; composition

Contents

Abstract

摘要

1 Introduction-1

1.1 Background of the study-1

1.2 Need for the study-1

1.3 Overall structure of the thesis-1

2 Literature Review-2

2.1 Public service advertisement-2

2.2 Multimodality-2

2.3 Previous studies-3

2.4 Perspective of the study-3

3 Theoretical Framework: Visual Grammar-4

4 Multimodal Analysis of the Public Service Advertisement Family-5

4.1 Representational meaning-5

4.1.1 Narrative representation-5

4.1.2 Conceptual representation-6

4.2 Interactive meaning-6

4.2.1 Contact-6

4.2.2 Social distance-7

4.2.3 Perspective-8

4.2.4 Modality-8

4.3 Compositional meaning-9

4.3.1 Information value-9

4.3.2 Salience-10

5 Conclusion-10

5.1 Major findings-10

5.2 Limitations-11

References-12