Interactive Meanings Of Olympic Emblems

With the advancement of modern information technology, China has entered an era of information society. In the past few decades, discourse analysis mainly concentrates on texts, without paying enough attention to analyzing images, movies, or other three-dimensional objects. According to Kress and van Leeuwen (1996), images are discourses as well, and they can be analyzed by using the theories in the area of discourse analysis. However, images are different from texts in some aspects after all. Since images integrate more than one modality together, they are called multimodal discourses. In order to analyze images and other multimodal discourses in a new and reasonable way, Kress and van Leeuwen establish visual grammar (VG) on the basis of Halliday's systemic functional linguistics, which treats language as a system of meaning potential, which has three metafunctions, ideational, interpersonal and textual. According to VG, a multimodal discourse has three meanings, representational, interactive and compositional, corresponding to the three metafunctions, respectively. And the analysis of multimodal discourses is called multimodal discourse analysis (MDA).The application of MDA has been made in many areas, including advertisements, movies, and other multimodal discourses. This thesis makes an MDA of the Olympic emblems, with an emphasis on the interactive meanings of Olympic emblems. The four elements of VG related to the interactive meanings include contact, social distance, perspective and modality. In addition, due to the fact that the interactive meaning is corresponding to the interpersonal metafunction in systemic functional grammar, the APPRAISAL is also employed with focus on attitude system to analyze the image-verbiage relation. Through the MDA of Olympic emblems, it can be concluded that the interactive meanings are expressed through the enhancement of the four VG elements and positive attitudinal resources.The materials to be analyzed come from the Olympic emblems from 25th to 29th, including five summer Olympic emblems and five winter Olympic emblems. These ten Olympic emblems come from nine countries, which distribute all over the world, and they can reflect different cultures and ideologies, thus adding varieties to Olympic emblems. The chosen Olympic emblems are analyzed through MDA, and Appraisal resources, with an emphasis on attitude system. As to the elements of MDA, a detailed qualitative analysis is given.The thesis is aimed at explaining the application of MDA in the analysis of the interactive meanings of Olympic emblems and offering the readers a basic understanding of the theory of MDA.