Semiosis in Visual and Textual Texts of Advertising Billboards :A Functional Approach

The main purpose of present article is studying Tehran billboards based on Halliday’s functionalism regarding social semiotics. Communicative and functional roles are the main roles of language in functional approaches. Advertising billboards are tools trying to communicate and transfer messages to audience. They try to communicate with the audience and convey meaning and message through a variety of multi-layered texts. Each billboard image is sometimes a text that contains different elements such as color, shape, line, and speech, and there are always different linguistic and extralinguistic factors involved in conveying commercial messages. In this paper, an attempt is made to represent the three experiential, interpersonal and textual metafunctions in the image and speech of advertising billboards from the perspective of Halliday’s functional approach and to determine how to convey meaning through semiotic mechanisms. Therefore, in order to accomplish the objectives of the paper (representing the metafunctions in images and speeches of billboards),the topics of social semiotics, semiotics of images, metaphor, action and tension processes of discourse are also discussed to explain how to convey meaning through verbal and visual signs. The main assumption is that advertisers have been able to convey and express meaning through words and images by using theoretical mechanisms and metafunctions of Halliday’s functional grammar and its connection with the field of special discourse. Therefore, in order to conduct the research, during a simple random sampling with a free subject, billboards in Tehran were photographed and then the research data were analyzed by analytical research methodology. Billboards containing visual and textual texts have been analaysed in accordance with theoretical mechanism of systematic grammer in terms of ideational, interpersonal, textual metafunctions and semiotics to achieve semiosis methods. Findings confirmed the desirable performance of this functional theory in the field of advetising billboards. Results of this study indicates that Halliday functional approach with its sociological semiotic features is an ideal model for achieving and gaining means of expressing meaning and can well be the basis of classifying, analyzing and explaining words as well as image. In these billboards textual texts have informative function and visual texts have expressives function.The current article shows that interpretation of meaning is done in different methods in multi-layer texts of billboards and the manifestation and embodiment of mentioned metafunctions are indicative of the fact that each advertising billboard is in fact a unitary and integrated text and the coherence resulted from aggregation of verbal and visual layers, provides a suitable basis for the semiosis of the various concepts and transmission of it to the audience.