Multimodal Construal Of The Interpersonal Meaning In Film Trailer

As a promotional tool, film trailer is a special sub-genre of filmic discourse with the aim to persuade the potential audience to go the theater to see the film it advertised. With the development of new technology and the prosperity of film industry, film trailer is becoming more and more important as part of film propaganda. Film trailer which mostly last2-3minutes, is a typical multimodal dynamic discourse because of the involvement and interaction of various semiotic resources such as moving images, language, sound, music, etc. In order to understand and appreciate how the persuasive effects of film trailers are achieved, multimodal discourse analysis of the interpersonal meaning of the film trailer discourse is undertaken in this thesis.Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) is the extension of Systemic Functional theory to other non-verbal semiotic resources. It views other semiotic systems the same as language system as social semiotic with meaning potential. Since it’s born in1990s, it has been applied to print pages as well as three-dimensional objects such as sculpture and buildings. In recent years, the new hot trend has been seen extended to dynamic discourses like film, TV advertisement etc.Based on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Visual Grammar (VG), the present research sets out to investigate the construal of interpersonal meaning of multimodal discourse of film trailer. The results will be revealing to see how producers of film trailer interacts and constructs solidarity with the potential audience and how they persuade the potential audience to buy the tickets to go to the theater through various verbal and visual resources and the interaction between different semiotic systems.According to Yahoo Movie of the most viewed film trailer of the year, thirty different genres of film trailers are chosen to build a small corpus, then six film trailers representing different genres are randomly chosen as analyzing samples in this thesis. Based on O’Halloran’s film analysis model, taken shot as the basic unit, it aims to analyze and identify the interpersonal resources both in language and images. The analysis reveals that:(1) In visual system, the image act, the social distance, the ATTITUDE and the modality of visual images in film trailers are carefully chosen and designed for the effective construal of interactive meaning to align the potential viewers.(2) In verbal system, the four aspects corresponding to the visual system for the construal of interpersonal meaning reveal that, as a special kind of advertisement, the verbal part play an important role for the construal of interpersonal meaning of the whole multimodal discourse. Various language resources have been skillfully used by film trailer producers to manipulate the interaction and to gain the solidarity with potential viewers.(3) It is also found that the visual system and verbal system enforce and complement with each other, combined together in film trailer for the construal of an integrated overall interpersonal meaning of the dynamic multimodal discourse.This thesis extends the studies of SFL and VG to the multimodal discourse analysis by interpreting multimodal filmic discourse. It is expected to deepen the understanding of film trailer as a typical multimodal discourse, which deserves much more academic attention and it will benefit both the common audience as consumers and the trailer producers as specialists.