Multimodal Discourse Analysis On The Meaning-Construction In Official Webpages Of Western Tourist Attractions

As a promotional tool and a subfield of tourism text, the tourist attractions’webpage text aims to provide tourist information which is relevant to the touristattractions for the potential tourists who have intentions to travel. Besides, successfullypersuading them to choose the tourist attractions as the ultimate destination is one ofthe most important purposes. As an authoritative display platform of information, theofficial webpages of tourist attractions possess more direct and stronger persuasionthan any other publicity ways. With the rapid development of multimedia technology,the means of communicating and getting information has greatly tended to the network,which has become one of the important sources of information.The tourist attractions’ webpage text is multimodal with the involvement andinteraction of various semiotic resources (such as words, image, color, cartoon, link,etc.) during the process of meaning-construction. Previous studies on tourism textmainly focus on monomodal ones. Taking the gap between theoretical research andreality into account, the multimodal features of tourist attractions’ webpage text areprimarily studied in this thesis.As a subfield of discourse analysis, multimodal discourse analysis studies theprocess of meaning-construction and the interplay of various semiotic resources. Now,the multimodal discourse analysis has been an effective measure which is repeatedlyapplied to printed text, hypertexts, three-dimensional object, etc.Thirty-five webpages are randomly collected from official website of westerntourist attractions, and they are from the World Heritage Lists which are widely known.This thesis firstly adopts Janet Jones’ multimodal Content Analysis to make aquantitative analysis of the multimodal features in official webpages of western touristattractions, then utilizes Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar to make acomprehensive qualitative analysis of the official webpages of western touristattractions from the three meanings of multimodal text. Based on the two procedures, the following conclusions could be derived:This thesis is of great practical significance. To some extent, the perspective andmethod of previous studies on meaning-construction of multimodal texts are updated.On the one hand, the mode resources in OWWTA mainly focus on representationalfunction and interactive function, and hardly the compositional function. Specifically,the representational function and the interactive function primarily employ images toexpress meaning while compositional function uses more verbal symbols. On the otherhand, the analysis of multimodal meaning-construction contributes to making adequatechoices and applying ample semiotic resources, then building a text for optimalconstruction and understanding.