An Analysis of Greenhouse Effect Advertisement

An analysis of greenhouse effect advertisement

This essay analyzes a one-paged sized public service advert for WWF (see the Appendix). WWF is short for World Wide Fund for Nature. The purpose of this advert is to tell people the harmful influences of Greenhouse effect and publicize the importance of low carbon emission. The purpose could be got through a multimodal analysis, including verbal and visual parts. To be more specific, the methodologies are systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and visual social semiotics (VSS). Finally, the relations between visual image and verbal text will be discussed. The aim is to tell viewers the terrible influence of the greenhouse effect and bring more people along in the side of environmental friendly. For the reason that this advert contains only one sentence, this essay will pay more attention on the visual part.

The first level of SFL analysis: ideational metafunction

On the whole page, there is only one sentence appears on the upper part, “when you leave the light on you’re not the only one who pays”. There are several different verbal processes in this sentence. For instance, In “When you leave the light on”, the “leave” refers to process of “doing”. So it is material. Similarly, “the only one who pays” is also a material because of “pays”. Besides “you’re” is relational, because “are” is a process of “being”.

The first level of VSS analysis: representational metafunction

On the first level of VSS, the South Pole and the North Pole are visually metaphorized as the wall painting, which is allocated in the middle of the advert. As it is known to all, north bears are typical North Pole animals and penguins are typical South Pole animals. In the advert, they all appear in the wall painting. They stand on the melting pack ice, terrified. Below the wall painting, there is a floor lamp and the light is on. The floor lamp carries a metaphor, it means a waste of electricity as human’s normal phenomenon. Besides, the lighted floor lamp looks like the sun. They both share characters like heat and keep lighting all the time. Consequently, it is metaphorized as the sun. All these elements are participants in this advert. They are all participants in this advert. Additionally, they interact with each other implicitly. There are vectors; invisible lines connect all the participants in this advert. In the wall painting, one bear is looking to the left while the other bear is looking to the right. Similarly, one penguin is looking to the left, and the other is looking the contrary side. From their eyelines, we can see there is melting iceberg floating on the sea. There is no land for them to live and they will become homeless. Apart from this, the floor lamp contains a vector as well, which looks like a limb and an arrow points