| Multimodal discourse is a set of practices which entails going beyond language as social semiotic and making use of two or multiple semiotic resources for meaning making, for instance, language, visual images, music, space, gesture and so on. In the historical context of global visual culture, everyday lives become more pervasively mediated by multimodal discourse and are increasingly shaped by representations which are produced all over the world. Consequently, multimodal research is of great significance in theory and practice.Theoretically, attending to the multimodal to embrace image as a discourse poses particular challenges for discourse analysts who have worked primarily with verbal texts. The limits of monomodal grammar are soon reached. Academic disciplines that focus on monomodality, such as that of linguistics, must come in dialogue with other fields of research, for instance, visual communication studies and media studies, to facilitate the interdisciplinary nature of multimodal research. Meanwhile, since Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) is the social semiotic approach of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) anchored in Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL), two major concerns of CDA become another point of departure for the present study. With respect to APPRAISAL theory, a framework recently developed within SFL theorizing of interpersonal meaning, its potentials for strengthening MDA remain to be further tapped. Practically, the historical context of global visual culture brings new challenges of"visual literacy"or"visuacy"as a matter of survival for global citizenship, especially for English educators. Besides critical linguistic literacy, English learners should be capable of Critical Visual Literacy (hereafter CVL) so as to better discern and free themselves from the hegemonic discourse saturated in the Western media. As a result MDA has become a very exciting research frontier. When MDA as a fledging practicing field is emerging and flourishing in different nations and across many different fields, my examination of the publications reveals that there is very limited literature on Multimodality in China. Although the information age is being heralded around the world, the Chinese are not better prepared to consume the wealth of information available to them. Drawing upon Kress and van Leeuwen's (1996) Visual Grammar (hereafter VG) based on SFL, and APPRAISAL recently developed within SFL, the present study is to contribute to this relatively new field by proposing a model of Multimodal Interactive Discourse Analysis (MIDA) as the analytical tool in an attempt to provide a better understanding of the hidden ideology unveiled by American Time magazine front covers as multimodal discourse across a reasonably disparate range of topics on China– politics, society, culture and economy, and covering the period of the 2007 year, and further to unravel the implications for the elaboration of multimodal research and for Critical Media Literacy (hereafter CML as an umbrella term including CVL) and to meet the opportunities and challenges that information explosion thrust upon the global citizen.Fruitful illuminating findings are derived from the detailed sample analysis and statistical analysis: The interactions of all subsystems under Multimodal Interactive meaning play a key role in the process of naturalization and realization of the interpersonal control of the potential viewer. Firstly, more"offers"than"demands"under Contact,higher frequency of"long shot"than"close shot"and high Modality are strongly valued across the 10 media texts from Time to hold its ostensible stance of factuality and neutrality as an weekly international news magazine created in 1923 and one of the Top Three news magazines domestically. Secondly, with respect to Engagement positioning, a pair of opposites is made through image-verbiage intersemiosis: visual image provides a site of heteroglossic contestation, whether dialogically expansive or contractive, while verbiage almost typically employs"monoglossia"which declares a proposition absolutely. This is due to the multiple roles played by Time. Thirdly, with respect to Attitude positioning, the evoked visual tokens in general could find explicit expression in verbal evaluations, usually except for Affect values. Fourthly, nowadays, Third World cultures, economies, politics remain mainly the exotic and inferior constructs that are dominantly marketed through the Western media as inferior"other". The stereotypical Western representations of China as mysterious and backward create the very reality they seek to see and cater to the Westerners'static imagination of"mysterious Asians"in the naturalization and dissemination of"cultural imperialism"in order to construct U.S. hegemonic political discourse of"chosen"nation rhetoric in the positioning of the global community.This thesis includes five chapters with the arrangement as the following: Chapter 1 briefly introduces what, why and how to do the present study as an overall framing of the whole research, that is, it will briefly introduce the research question, rationales and methodology of the present study. Chapter 2 presents a review of the philosophical underpinnings and relevant theories and practices of MDA in the context of postmodern globalization and then points out that those in China are sporadic and limited. Chapter 3 proposes a model of Multimodal Interactive Discourse Analysis (hereafter MIDA), which serves as an overarching model and a metalanguage to describe the meaning-making processes involved in semiosis and intersemiosis in multimodal texts. Chapter 4 deconstructs how the producing subjects of ten media samples naturalize an ideal viewer, which simultaneously unveils behind magazine front covers American hegemonic ideologies towards China. Chapter 5 concludes by summarizing major findings of the research, by discussing the theoretical and practical contributions of the study, and by suggesting limitations and further directions for research. |
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