Systemic Functional Linguistics Perspective Multi Modal Interpersonal Significance

Modern social semiotics believes that all social semiotics besides language are meaning resources, including image, voice, gesture, facial expression and so on. In our daily life, people exchange not only by languages but always by more than one mode, i.e. multimodal communication. Especially with the improvement of high technology and the development of media technique, multimodal communication gradually generalizes and diversifies and plays an important role in people's life and work. As the founder of systemic functional grammar, Halliday contributes a lot to the development of modern social semiotics by proposing notions like "language as social semiotics", metafunctions of language, etc. Among them the three metafunctions: ideational, interpersonal and textual functions are employed by Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996) to form theoretical foundations for the multimodal discourse analysis when they propose the visual grammar for the analysis of images. They claim that the image just like language can represent social practice, express human relations and also organize themselves.The thesis draws on the theories of systemic functional grammar and visual grammar to investigate how multimodal discourse delivers interpersonal meaning and enacts social relations. The data we use in the thesis is a promotion video of World Expo Shanghai 2010, mainly telling about the site, location, countries joined, pavilions and other preparation works. The video is a typical multimodal discourse involving word, image, color, caption, music and other visual and auditive modes. The thesis will focus on the analysis of how words and images in this promotion video enact interpersonal function and how different modes interact with each other to construct the whole meaning. As a tentative research, the author tries to prove the applicability of SFL in multimodal discourse analysis and practicality of visual grammar. In addition, the author hopes that this study may enrich the scopes of MDA and enhance people's ability to read multimodal discourse.