The Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing,Missouri

The emergence of Multimodal discourse analysis in the 1990’s has attracted lots of linguists’ interests.As a newly developed theory,multimodal discourse analysis studies the implied meanings that various semiotic signs convey by different kinds of modalities such as language,image,sound,color and gesture.It is no longer confined to single mode which linguists focused on previously.Multimodal discourse analysis is becoming a flourishing research subject in the field of discourse analysis,and many linguists are dedicating themselves to broadening the research fields of the theory.But the studies of multimodal discourse analysis have mainly focused on the static discourses,such as magazine covers,communicative discourses and film posters.The multimodal discourse analysis of dynamic discourses needs to be explored more deeply,elaborating how different modalities work together to construct the implied meanings.This thesis adopts qualitative research method,selecting a film Three Billboards outside Ebbing,Missouri as the research subject for analysis.According to the film plot,three conflicts are constructed in the film to promote the development of the story: the conflict between the leading lady and her family members,the leading lady and two police officers,the characters and social requirements.On the theoretical basis of Halliday’s systemic functional grammar and Kress and Van Leeuwen’s visual grammar,this thesis tries to analyze the functions of the verbal mode and visual mode in each conflict,to examine the relationship between language and image,to explore three research questions: how do the visual modalities construct meaning to express the conflicts,how do the verbal modalities construct meaning to express the conflicts,and what are the relationships between these modalities in the film.The research findings show that the language and images in the film complement with each other to construct a whole story for the audience.From the perspective of visual mode,action process and reaction process are frequently used to express therepresentational meaning.The realization of interactive meaning always rely on offer acts,close or medium shots and frontal or low angle.The left-right and center-margin information structure,and the connection framing are important elements to construct the compositional meaning in the film.From the perspective of verbal mode,the ideational function is realized by the transitivity system and voice.Material process,mental process and verbal process are applied to express the conflicts between the characters.Active voice is preferred to convey the character’s thoughts positively.The declarative,interrogative and imperative mood are used to realize the interpersonal function of the language,presenting the characters’ personalities.This research will broaden the research field of multimodal discourse analysis and test the practicability and feasibility of the theory.The multimodal discourse analysis of three different conflicts in the film not only enables the audience to comprehensively and exactly understand the implied meanings of each conflict,but also provides the audiences with a new angle to appreciate the genre of film,exploring what have been ignored before.