Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Magazine Covers

With the advent of the information age, the way people communicate hasdramatically changed since the invention of new media. Language carriers havedeveloped from the original sound, to text, to image, and then to video, thus becomericher and more colorful. The traditional discourse analysis speciifed in languageitself has been unable to carry out more in-depth and comprehensive discourseanalysis. Accordingly，discourse analysis is compelled to take more complex semioticresources into consideration for the all-round analysis and has also entered a newstage of the multimodal discourse analysis. The multimodal discourse analysis hassprung up in western countries in the1990s. The main theoretical basis formultimodal discourse analysis is systemic functional linguistics founded by Halliday.Kress and van Leeuwen, inspired by three metafunctions in Hallida’ys systemicfunctional grammar, develop a theoretical model for the multimodal discourseanalysis of visual semiotic systems such as image. Multimodal discourse analysis, asan interdisciplinary and applicative research, has affected the directions of manydisciplines today, such as foreign language education research, media discourseanalysis, cultural studies, etc., and can play a signiifcant role in theory and reality.This theory is still in its initial and potential stage both at home and abroad. In2003，Li Zhanzi introduced multimodal discourse analysis theory into China for the ifrsttime.This thesis, with ten samples selected from the best magazine covers highlyvalued by American Society of Magazine Editors in2011as its corpus and thetheoretical framework of Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar as its basicanalytic tool, presents a detailed multimodal discourse analysis on selected magazinecover from representational, interactive, and compositional meanings respectively.From three aspects of analysis, this thesis explores the way of meaning-making ofmagazine cover discourse. In addition, the article also selects a typical sample fromthe ten magazine covers, to conduct an in-depth and comprehensive analysis on itsimage and verbal modes speciifcally, taking the contextual factors into consideration,to elaborate the complex relationship between the various modes and how differentmodes interact with each other and work together to construct the whole meaning. Asa tentative analysis, this article attempts to examine the practicality and applicabilityof visual grammar in the multimodal discourse analysis of magazine cover. Thetheoretical and practical signiifcance of this study lies in the following two aspects:ifrst, it enriches the research methods of discourse analysis, studies multimodediscourse analysis in a wider area. Second, it helps people to enhance theirmultiliteracy ability of the magazine covers, and provides useful tools for magazineeditors and other media practitioners in their daily work. Through the analysis on selected corpus, the applicability of visual grammaranalysis of magazine covers is proved in this thesis. This study ifnds:1) Therepresentational meanings of magazine covers can be seen as an introduction ofcertain events to the viewers.2) The interactive meanings of magazine covers playsthe most important part in visual grammar and can be realized by the integration ofcontact, social distance, perspective and modality.3) Information value, salience, andframing act in a cooperative way to realize the compositional meanings and reach acoherent multimodal discourse in magazine covers.4) In addition to threemetafunctions in visual grammar, the contextual meaning should be taken intoconsideration when analyzing magazine covers.5) Magazine covers express itsprofound social and practical meanings through the integration of various modalitiesand related background knowledge to attract the reader’s attention. In addiiton, thereare still immature aspects in the theory and research of multimodal discourse, thisthesis also points out the inadequacies of this study, and forecasts further researchdirections.