A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Chinese "Two-Child Policy" Cartoons

In the current digital era,human communication multimodal features are growing prominent.So the ability to read multimodal texts is also gradually attracting more and more attention.The cartoon is one of the many such discourses.Modern cartoon has been studied by scholars at home and abroad from the perspective of art,society and culture.However,there are few studies on cartoons from the social semiotics perspective,especially from the multimodal discourse analysis.Based on the systematic-functional grammar(Halliday,1994)and visual grammar(Kress & van Leeuwen,2006),this thesis studies the Chinese two-child policy cartoons mainly by the qualitative method complementary with quantitative method.Altogether 40 cartoons were collected from the authoritative news sites as the research object.And the thesis mainly explores how the images and words in cartoons to realize the three meta-functions,namely three kinds of meaning.Then it discusses the multimodal features of Chinese two-child policy cartoons and the influencing factors behind these features.The analysis shows that the design of the Chinese two-child policy cartoons mainly relies on the image mode complementing with word mode.The two modes respectively realize three-functions in different ways and complement with each other to construct unified discourses.As for the ideational/representational meaning,the word mode is mainly realized by the material process;image mode mainly uses the action process,speech and mental process.As for the interpersonal/ interactive meaning,image mode is mainly realized by the declarative mood,third person and present tense.While the image mode is mainly conveyed through offering information,long shots,oblique and eye-eye angle design.Both of them represent the unfamiliar but equal relationship between the viewers and participants in the cartoons so as to reveal some potential problems more objectively.As to the textual /compositional meaning,both the modes arrange the given and new information in a left-right way.Moreover,the image mode is principally realized by the top-bottom information organization,size and color to highlight the information,segregation,separation and rhyme to frame the cartoons.Finally,the thesis discusses the factors to influence the multimodal features of Chinese two-child policy cartoons.The thesis not only broadens the research field of multimodal discourse analysis,but also contributes to improving the viewer’s multimodal reading ability.It also offers some creative experience to the cartoon designers and other media communicators.In addition,it provides some guidance for national relevant department workers to successfully implement the two-child policy.