A Diachronic Multimodal Analysis of How Dog Food Advertisements Construct Meanings for Promotion

Abstract

Based on Michael Halliday’s systemic functional grammar and its important extend-visual grammar proposed by Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen, this paper aims at analyzing how different features in the dog food advertisements gather together to realize their functions of appealing, promotion, and persuading. By collecting and coding data in a diachronic sequence, this paper gives a case study in which 15 representative dog food advertisements from 1960s to present are thrown in to a multimodal discourse analysis framework. The findings, from the social semiotics perspective, shed light on figuring out main patterns of representational, interactive, and compositional meanings of dog food advertisements.