| With the development of technology, the old communicative pattern which employs mono-modality to express meaning cannot meet the growing demand of people. In a fairly long period of time, language serves as the only way to convey meaning. But, today, other symbols such as images, sounds have already joined in people’s daily communication activities. This phenomenon results in the appearance of the multi-modal discourse analysis. In this area, Visual Grammar (Kress and Van Leeuwen,1996) is deemed as a rather mature theory among foreign researches. While studies at home fall into two categories, one belongs to the introduction of theoretical foundation and researches abroad, and the other is to apply these theories to study static texts, such as posters and ads. However, few studies have touched upon the aural modality, let alone the relations between images and sounds in a dynamic text.Both quantitative study and qualitative study are used in this study, while the qualitative analysis plays the major role. Different from former studies, this study selects film Eat, Pray, Love as the corpus, dividing it into video clips by technique means, employing Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar (1996) to process the images, borrowing Van Leeuwen’s important concepts to analyze sounds, then using multi-modal discourse analysis framework proposed by Zhang Delu (2009) to reveal the relations between visual-modality and aural-modality in these chosen clips. This study aims at exploring how visual-modality and aural-modality interact with each other to present the overall meaning in a dynamic discourse.Regarding theoretical significance, this thesis explores how various semiotics interact to provide the whole meaning of the dynamic corpus. As a result, it emphasizes the position of other semiotic resources (except for language) in the process of expressing meaning. In this way, this study attempts to stress the important role of other related disciplines (such as communication studies and semeiology) in presenting meaning. The practical significance lies in three aspects:in the first place, this thesis uses a new database to test the practicality of the theories in multimodal discourse analysis. And then it attempts to overcome the limitation of previous filmic discourse studies and focuses on studying the interactions between visual-modality and aural-modality. Finally, it provides a new audio-visual perspective for the appreciation of the film.The study shows that the interactions between visual-modality and aural-modality can be summarized as four types:integration, complementarity, non-complementarity and singularity. Integration includes synchronization, asynchronization and counterpoint. Complementarity includes reinforced relationship and non-reinforced relationship. And the reinforced relationship is embodied by prominence, priority and expansion, while the non-reinforced relationship is represented by coordination and union. Non-complementarity includes overlapping, inclusion and context-interaction. Singularity is shown by silence in this film corpus. It is the variety of interaction between visual-modality and aural-modality that constructs the whole meaning of the corpus. However, as a result of the limitation of film corpus and the immaturity of the related theories, this study only explores the interaction of visual-modality and aural-modality. The studies on the relations among different sound types in aural-modality still need further exploration, and also the differences between the film and the book of the same name needs deeper investigation. |
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