A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Text&picture-in-one In Corporate Social Responsibility Reports

In recent years, messages are conveyed not only by language but also throughmultimodalities such as image, video or music etc. Being exposed to information erawith multiple modes, scholars both abroad and at home have been engaged in themultimodal discourse analysis which is widely applied to the analysis of advertisements,film posters, poems, movies and PowerPoint. Based on the theoretical framework ofHalliday’s systemic-functional linguistics and Kress and Van Leeuwen’s visual grammar,the thesis analyzes text-with-picture in three Corporate Social Responsibilityreports(CSR) released by corporations ranking in the fortune500including ExxonMobile, Idemitsu, Generali in2013, focusing on pictures and texts in the pictures. CSRis that the corporation elaborates what they have done in the past in order to fulfill itsresponsibilities for stakeholders, consumers, employees, resources and environment etc.In this research, both qualitative and descriptive methods are adopted to clarify theresearch topic approximately.On the basis of the review of both multimodal discourse analysis and CSR studyand under the theoretical foundations of visual grammar based on thesystemic-functional linguistics, the thesis discusses the pictures and texts in the CSRfrom aspects of ideational/representational meaning, interpersonal/interactive meaning,and textual/compositional meaning, aiming at exploring and analyzing the feasibility ofthe theory, especially the visual grammar in analyzing the CSR or such business readingor writing files and the possibility of extending the application of multimodal discourseanalysis.