A multimodal analysis of Nigerian public health awareness posters

Abstract

This article presents a multimodal analysis of the public health awareness posters from Katsina state, Nigeria. 100 posters were  purposefully sampled and analysed using the generic structure potential (GSP) of printed advertisements after Cheong, Kress and Van  Leeuwen’s visual grammar, Martinec and Salway’s model of text-image relations and Airhihenbuwa’s PEN-3 model. The findings show  that display, which refers to the photographic show of the message, and announcement, which is the most noticeable linguistic  component, are among the obligatory components. Display mostly occurs in an intangible form as it is difficult to be depicted concretely,  while the obligatory announcement is always the ‘primary announcement’, i.e. the announcement which conveys the central idea of the  poster. Moreover, language and image contribute to the meaning-making process. Likewise, the pictures perform an ‘exemplification  function’ in logico-semantic relations. Therefore, the GSP of Nigerian public health awareness posters (NPHAP) is proposed as: lead ^  display ^ (emblem) ^ announcement ^ (enhancer) ^ (tag) ^ (call-and-visit information). This means that for informational material to  qualify as a Nigeran public health awareness poster, it must exhibit at least the obligatory components (those not in brackets).