Abstract

Political campaign posters have become one of the major means of creating awareness of the
candidates to the electorates. Multimodal discourse is an approach that combines various methods of
analysis to communicate using text, pictures and other semiotic resources. This approach, however, is
not just a merger of different modes in discourse but serve as an improved means of communicating to
the electorates. The study adopted Kress and van Leuween’s Social Semiotic theory as the theoretical
framework to analyze three political posters of Leni Robredo during the 2022 elections. Only posters
that contain multimodal resources are selected. The study aims at divulging how the visual images and
patterns in these posters combine with the grammar to portray the aspirants’ purpose and intention.
The study revealed the importance of using Multimodal framework in analyzing posters, as it enables
readers to be more cautious of every detail and element in the posters and enabling the readers to
develop critical thinking as they decode meaning of the image not from the linguistic mode only but also
from the non-linguistic. The study also revealed the linguistic and non-linguistic resources employed in
each political poster and also the social reality that warranted their use. People tend to focus on just the
linguistic resources to derive meaning by focusing on the textual part of the poster more than they focus
on the visual elements in the posters. This study further established the relevance of Multimodal
Discourse Analysis to interpret and decode the hidden and embedded meanings in these posters. The
study concluded that political campaign posters communicate deeper to the public through the
integration of several multimodal resources used for the purpose of meaning explication.

Key words: multimodal discourse analysis, 2022 elections, political posters

Methodology
This study is a multimodal disourse analysis. Multimodal analysis is a method of
exploring, evaluating and analysing recorded, printed or visual material in a systematic, critical,
and objective way (Wimmer & Dominick, 2000). The data to be analyzed in this paper consists
the political posters designed to represent former Vice President of the Republic of the
Philipppines, Maria Leonor Robredo, famously known as Leni Roberedo, during the 2022
election campaigns where she ran for presidency. Consequently, three political posters will be
analyzed.
The posters under analysis were compiled from the Filipino web page Hot Pink Center
(see http://leni.pw/media/flyers.html), which compiles different campaign materials related to
Leni Robredo (newspapers articles, photographs, political posters, social media pages etc.). The
general objective of this study is to analyze the political posters of Leni Robredo in order to
explore the main linguistic and visual characteristics used in the posters in order to persuade
the audience. The analysis will also find out the similarities and differences between the posters
under analysis.
The analysis is carried out using Social Semiotic approach to multimodality developed by
Gunther Kress & van Leeuwen (2006) as a linguistic framework for the study, as it allows one to
read a single image in numerous ways. The method of analysis is describing meaning as
representational, interactional and compositional. The visual composition of each poster was
analyzed paying attention to information value, salience and framing. The analysis of the
written language and the visuals was done in order to observe how the different modes express
meaning.
References
Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading images: The grammar of visual design. Second
edition. London: Routledge Press.

Wimmer, R.D. and J.R. Dominick (2000) Mass Media Research: An Introduction, 6th edn.
Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.