A Study Of News Homepages Based On The GeM Model

Nowadays news website provides real-time news as much as possible which leads to reading news by browsing the news website becomes a main path in our daily life. Therefore, the homepage, as the door of the website, plays not only the navigation role but also presents the typical service of the whole website. News homepage as one kinds of multimodal hypertext differentiates itself from the static multimodal discourse, having its own multimodal features. It is meaningful to understand and study its features in order to improve our multiliteracy.The news homepage, composed of different semiotic modes, is one kind of multimodal discourse which can be treated as both an object of perception and an object of interpretation. The thesis firstly makes a systematical and objective analysis on the news homepage from three layers based on the GeM model:the base layer, the layout layer and the rhetorical layer. Then the thesis analyzes the modality and navigation features of the news homepage in detail.The results demonstrate that the news homepage has its own multimodal features. The analysis on the base layer finds out text, photo, logo, line, icon, moving picture and frame are the mostly used semiotic modes on the news homepage. Ubiquitous semiotic modes like video, quick response code (henceforth:Qr code) are not applied by all news homepages. Based on the function, the news homepages can choose whether use them or not. For the layout layer, even though all of them are viewed from the top to the bottom under the influence of the computer screen, there are different layout structures for news homepages. The homepages of People’s Daily Online, Xinhua, and China Daily have the same macro layout structures which consist of the main body in the center and white spaces on the left and on the right, namely, left-center-right. China News Service homepage, however, chooses the macro layout structure of "top to bottom". There is also different layout between image and text on news homepages. The homepages of People’s Daily Online, Xinhua, and China News Service put the image on the left and on the top, text on the right and on the bottom; however, China Daily puts the text on the left and on the top, image on the right and on the bottom. According to analysis of the rhetorical layer, there are two rhetorical systems on news homepages: one is the high level rhetorical structure of the news homepage as a whole; the other is the low level rhetorical structure within a piece of news.The analysis of modality and navigation features of news homepages demonstrates that news homepages tend to adopt semiotic modes with medium modality potentials like text, icon and so on. Therefore, they have the medium modality. The navigation analysis shows that text and photo are two main navigation modes on the news homepages. These two aspects demonstrate that the news homepage not only tries to offer news and service, but wants to keep pleasing features to attract readers.The innovation of the thesis includes two aspects. Firstly, theoretically the thesis adopts the GeM model, which treats multimodal discourse as multi-layered artifact. Such analysis not only includes the linearity of the news homepage but also non-linearity of the news homepage. It is to a great extent objective and comprehensive. Secondly, the news homepage, as a non-fictional multimodal hypertext, has not been studied before.One limitation of the analysis is that the thesis just analyzes the news homepages in their own terms. There is no analysis of social and cultural factors. Another limitation is that the four news homepages cannot represent all multimodal features of news homepages.