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Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Research Background
In one of the Courtland L. B and William F. Arens’s book (1992:5) “advertising is thenon-personal communication of information, usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature,about products (goods and services) or ideas by identified sponsors through various media”.Advertisement becomes an indispensable part of the modern society which has importantimpacts on social development and people’ s lives. Through the above data, it is clearly thatthe advertisements has come into people’s life unconsciously and quickly, the advertisers arelooking for the chance to change people’s attitude and behavior (for product advertisements,for buying the product; for non-product ads, not drive after drinking, to donate money forfamine relief, etc.) gradually and subconsciously through different methods and deceptivemethod.The ultimate purpose of advertisements is to provide information of a product andpersuade the viewers to buy products or services provided. Nowadays the advertising is notthe simple presentation of language description, but the combination of language, picture andsound. In past years most of researches in advertisement mainly focused on language alone,but we should also notice that picture and sound also play a prominent role in transmittinginformation. Because of the prominent features of advertising discourse, the study ofadvertising from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis has long become a hottopic for the past decades.
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1.2 Significance and Objectives of the Study
In the past decades there were lots of researches on advertisement from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis, but a few researches are about medicine advertisement, stillsome of the researches are just the analysis of language alone, not from the perspective ofmultimodal discourse. The previous studies of advertisements are purely from the verbal textor pictures, however this thesis considers verbal mode and visual mode to analyze theinterpersonal and interactive meaning of Chinese medicine advertisements. The overallobjective of this study is to analyze and interpret the persuasive function in Chinese medicineadvertisements discourse, and discover some methods used to realize persuasion. The presentstudy is bound to generate useful insights and implication both theoretically and practically.The main purpose of this research is to explore how the interactive meaning is realizedthrough verbal mode and visual mode and how persuasive function is achieved through thesetwo modes. The language and images will be studied from different dimensions. The resultsof this research can be helpful for the future scholars in this field.Theoretically, this research can establish plausible methodological model for Chinesemedicine advertisement. This research can test the applicability of existing MultimodalDiscourse Analysis (MDA) theories to medicine advertisement; and provide new researchperspectives for the study on other multimodal discourses.Practically, It is hoped that the potential customers of medicine products will benefit fromthis research from adopting a wise consuming behavior. For the advertisers, it may help themto produce finer advertisements.
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Chapter Two Literature Review

In this chapter, the definitions of the major terms are provided at first. Then thedevelopment of multimodal discourse analysis