A Multimodal Ecological Discourse Analysis Of COVID-19:Battling The Devil Based On Appraisal Theory

In the past 20 years,the rise of ecolinguistics has led to an ecological turn in linguistic studies.Meanwhile,based on appraisal system ecological discourse analysis has expanded the judgment of ecological properties of appraisal resources.Among them,the existing research objects are dominated by traditional static discourses,and there are relatively few studies on the ecological properties of dynamic images,especially the appraisal of multi-symbol resources in multimodal discourses.Among the types of multimodal discourse,documentaries carry out artistic processing and restoration of real people and events in life,and then convey certain attitudes to the audience to form a specific ecological relationship.The analysis of documentaries that are close to life from the perspective of multimodal EDA can not only enrich the types of research objects of EDA,but also help to explore the ecological relationship between the documentary and the audience.In this thesis,the documentary COVID-19:Battling the Devil,jointly produced by China and the United States,is used as the research material,which is of considerable research significance to probe into the ecological properties,utilization of the multimodal appraisal resources and the hidden ideologies in the documentary.Based on the appraisal theory from the perspective of ecolinguistics,this thesis integrates the visual grammar,pitch system and multimodal relationship framework theory.After integration,it forms new theoretical analysis framework of multimodal ecological appraisal system for this study aiming to answer three questions:(1)What are the ecological properties of appraisal resources in this documentary?(2)How are the appraisal meanings constructed through verbal,visual and audio modalities in this documentary?(3)What ideologies are reflected in this documentary? In this study,a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods is used to analyze the ecological properties of appraisal resources,the construction of ecological appraisal meanings and ideologies in the multimodal discourse.The verbal modality were classified and counted using software BFSU Qualitative Coder1.0.The visual and audio modalities were transcribed and annotated using Elan 5.9.0 and Praat 6.1.16,respectively.The results are as follows:(1)In the verbal modality,it uses appraisal resources to show the attitudes of different characters and the author on China’s response to the COVID-19 epidemic.The visual modality from different angles uses the contact,social distance,perspective and modality to render the actual situation of different scenes.In audio modality,the pitch stays more in the high position mainly to convey a positive energy attitude to the audience.These appraisal resources strive to establish a close alliance with the audience,form a harmonious ecological relationship and are judged as beneficial ecological appraisal resources.(2)The three modalities have a complementary relationship in the overall appraisal meanings.Among them,the visual modality is the most critical in the presentation of the overall appraisal meaning,followed by the verbal modality and audio modality.However,the importance of verbal modality and audio modality has been significantly improved with auxiliary visual effects.(3)People-oriented is the main ideology conveyed by documentaries,and this ideology gradually deepens into people-centered ideological cognition in the discourse.In addition,communitarianism,humanitarianism and optimism are also evident in the documentary.These ideologies fully incarnate the development concept of sharing the same fate with the breath in the documentary.The research findings of this thesis confirm the applicability of EDA in multimodal discourse,and develop a new theoretical framework for multimodal EDA.The multimodal information technology software used in this thesis greatly improves the efficiency of dynamic multimodal symbol transcription,annotation and statistics,and provides some certain useful guideline for future multimodal discourse research.In view of this,this study is also helpful for people to better understand the ecological relationship between multimodal discourse and the audience,meanwhile to further advance the audience’s ecological awareness of multimodal discourses.