Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Hollywood-like Movie Trailers

With the advent of information age, language is no longer the only source ofmeaning making. Various social semiotics such as images, music are more and morefrequently evolved into social practices, thus the establishment of a new grammar isurgent. It is in this background that Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) arises as anew trend of discourse analysis in1990s and has been paid close attention. Multimodaldiscourse refers to those discourses that generate the meaning through the interaction oftwo or more semiotic modes of communication. The most famous scholars who haveachieved great reward in this field are Kress and Van Leeuwen. They put forward thefirst systematic framework for analyzing multimodal discourse in the book ReadingImages. The so-called Visual Grammar (VG) is derived from systemic functionalgrammar (SFG) by Halliday. Yet so far as it is concerned, MDA is still at its initial stagesince most studies are focused on static image, while other types of modalities, such asthe sound, music in a dynamic discourse are inadequately touched upon. In terms of thisconsideration, this thesis chooses dynamic movie trailer discourse as study object inorder to explore the meaning making of visual and audio modalities and theirintegration as well as relationships between each other.Movie trailer is usually2-3minutes long, made for the purpose of promotingmovies. Movie promoters often select and edit some wonderful fragments from theup-coming movie. The function of advertising movie is carried out by narrating relevantinformation of a movie. As the movie capital and the origin of movie trailer in the world,Hollywood creative pattern has been already deep-rooted.Given the above consideration, the research is done by adapting both quantitativeand qualitative method with case study from the perspective of systemic functionalgrammar. It constructs a multimodal discourses analysis of Hollywood-like movietrailers based on the framework of Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar andmeanwhile draws upon sound systems of Van Leeuwen. Firstly, the thesis makes a recount on the definition and development of movie trailer and multimodal discourseanalysis, pointing out the goal of the research; secondly, by illustrating the shots ofselected movie trailers, the thesis states out the theoretical framework that can beapplied in the objective. Then under the guidance of framework, case study of movietrailer of The King’s Speech is carried out. As for the visual meaning, the thesiselaborates its representational, interactive and compositional meaning dynamically indetail. In addition, a pioneering explanation of how the sound features such asperspective, melody and sound quality convey meanings respectively in this movietrailer is given. Finally both visual and audio modalities are analyzed in a synthetic waywith the aim to explore how these various modality forms contribute each other to theoverall meaning making.The research reaches the expectation. Through the case study, it is found that thetheory of multimodal discourse analysis posses a strong applicability on analyzingdynamic discourses. Sound theory is tentatively brought into the study, thus expand theresearch field in multimodal discourse analysis.