英语论文网

CHAPTER ONE  INTRODUCTION  

1.1    Research Background 
People nowadays are bombarded with all kinds of advertisements everywhere like TV commercials  at  home,  posters  on  the  public  transportations,  billboards  by  the  road, and messages from mobile phones. The thesis chooses to analyze advertisements not only because its penetration into all aspects of people‘s life, but also due to the fact that it represents a genre full of metaphors with a multimodal character and clear-cut persuading intentions. There is no doubt that most of the time advertising is intended to draw people‘s attention, inform them about the message they try to  convey. For public  service  advertising,  they  intend  to  call  for  actions  for  better  causes.  And  for commercial  advertising  they  attempt  to  display  the  product  information  and  trigger further consumptions. So as to achieve the maximum effects of the persuasive power of  the  advertising  but  not  to  seem  desperately  pushing  and  annoy  target  audience  or potential customers at the same time, many advertising designers try their best to add metaphorical  elements  to  intrigue  people  instead  of  using  direct  and  straightforward promotions  in  conventional  ways.  The  advertisements  studied  are  mostly  endowed with  a  multimodal  characteristic  with  at  least  pictorial  and  linguistic  components. These features work in consistency as a whole to manifest the metaphorical meaning. Since printed advertisement ―need not be abridged in that they can be reproduced in their  entirety  and  more  or  less,  in  their  original  form‖  (Forceville,  1996:70),  the advertisements under study are all printed advertisements due to its static feature and in order to be more practical.Due  to  the  fact  that  verbal  language  is  no  more  the  only  or  even  the  main semiotic  mode,  previous  studies  which  concentrated  on  mono-modal  context  and linguistic  resources  are  inadequate  and  have  limitations  when  their  theories  being applied to explore the present multimodal discourses. Ever since its emergence in the late  1990s  and  prosperity  afterwards,  multimodal  discourse  analysis  including multimodal  metaphor  has  been  an  effective  way  to  analyze  the  non-linguistic resources.  Nevertheless,  most  of  the  researches  on  multimodal  metaphor  are conducted  from  the  perspective  of  cognitive  linguistics.  Seldom  are  there  studies examining  the  multimodal  metaphor  on  the  grounds  of  systemic-functional  theories, let  alone  using  the &n本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。