When a western political system poses the problems of how to communicate and persuade the potential voters to accept their leadership to the politicians, the application of political publicity has become one of the best choices in terms of its convenience and efficiency in the realization of their political objectives. The present study focused on the analysis of campaign advertising in the US general election of the latest three election cycles from the year of 2008 to 2016 as a case study from the semiotic perspective of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA). It centered on its deliberate design of meaning-making in language along with the artistic creations like image composition, coloring and presentation of identities from the angles of comprehensive and comparative study on both verbal and visual modes. Based on the analysis of the distribution of the multimodality in televised political advertising, it also analyzed the cooperation among those co-existing modes, revealing the buried ideas of power and ideology in multimodal political discourse.

王京京，皖西学院外国语学院讲师，博士，研究方向为话语分析。安徽省教坛新秀。发表论文4篇，主持省级教研课题1项，获省级教学成果三等奖1项。

Chapter Ⅰ Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
1.2 Research Purpose
1.3 Significance of the Research
1.4 Statement of the Problems
Chapter Ⅱ Review of Related Literature
2.1 Social Semiotic Foundation
2.2 Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
2.3 From CDA to MCDA
2.4 Modes Contributing to Meaning-making
Chapter Ⅲ Televised Political Advertising
3.1 Political Advertising
3.2 American General Election Campaign Advertising
Chapter Ⅳ Theoretical Framework
4.1 Benoit's Functional Approach to Political Discourse
4.2 Systemic-functional Grammar
4.3 Visual Grammar
4.4 Image-text Relations
4.5 Research Paradigm of the Study
Chapter Ⅴ Research Methodology
5.1 Research Design
5.2 Corpus of the Study
5.3 Data Gathering Procedures
5.4 Encoding and Decoding of Data
5.5 Statistical Instrument
Chapter Ⅵ Distribution of Verbal and Visual Modes
6.1 Functional Distribution of Corpus
6.2 Verbal Modes Analysis
6.3 Visual Modes Analysis
Chapter Ⅶ Meaning-making in Verbal-visual Interaction
7.1 Meaning-making in Ideational Function
7.2 Meaning-making in Interpersonal Function
7.3 Meaning-making in Interactive Function
7.4 Interaction Between Verbal and Visual Modes
7.5 Extension on Interpersonal Meaning
7.6 Ideology and Power in Visual-verbal Interactions
Chapter Ⅷ Conclusion
8.1 Contribution of the Study
8.2 Recommendations
References
Appendices