The Collaborative Construction Of Multimodal Meanings In Filmic Discourse

With the development of digital multimedia technology,the single language medium is gradually replaced by the complex medium composed of language,image and sound,and multimodal discourse analysis and discourse analysis have become hot topics in the field of linguistics at both home and abroad.In multimodal discourse,each modality has its own way of meaning expression,and the collaborative interaction between modalities influences the construction of the whole meaning.In recent years,scholars at home and abroad have conducted extensive researches on the collaborative construction of multimodal discourse meaning in foreign language teaching.However,the research on the collaborative construction of multimodal meaning in film discourse is still in its infant stage,and the current researches mainly focus on the study of visual modality,so there is a large research space.This thesis takes the American movie Dead Poets Society which has won several awards as the material of analysis,intercepts nine shots from the film,and adopts the theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics and the Visual Grammar as the framework to make a multimodal discourse analysis from the perspective of three meta-functional meanings.By adopting a descriptive method,the purpose of this study is to explore the construction of representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning in a dynamic discourse.At the same time,this thesis focuses on the collaborative construction process of various modalities in the film discourse,namely the verbal modality,visual modality and auditory modality,and the process of their jointly completing thematic meaning expression.It is found that the transitivity system in the verbal modality corresponds to the representational meaning in the visual modality,both of which coordinate with each other to promote the development of the film’s plot;the mood and modality in the verbal modality corresponds to the interactive meaning of visual modality,and the interactive correspondence between them can better reflect the personalities and their social relations in the film;There exists a certain collaborative relationship in verbal modality,visual modality and auditory modality and the integration of the three modalities can construct the overall meaning of the filmic discourse,which can reveal the theme of the film and give the audience better audio-visual enjoyment.This thesis,from a new perspective in filmic discourse,discusses the embodiment forms of the different modalities and the relationship between different modalities,and verifies the feasibility and operability of the collaborative construction of multimodal meanings in film discourse,which provides a practical evidence for collaborative construction of multimodal meaning in other fields and also provides the practical guidance for the studies on multimodal meaning integration in foreign language teaching.Moreover,the collaborative analysis of the multimodal discourse meanings can make the interpretation of the discourse meanings more comprehensively and accurately,and then help find out how to use different modalities to achieve the construction of thematic meanings,so as to improve the ability to understand multimodal discourses and multi-dimensional appreciation of literary works and film and television works.