Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Interactive Meaning In The Film Forrest Gump

With the development of the society, the new age of the technology is coming. In1900s, multimodal analysis which arose in the western country has become a hot issue inthe field of linguistics. Like language, other types of social modalities, such as music,image, and animation and so on, could construct the meaning and participated in peoplessocial activities. Therefore, language, a single modality, is not enough to fulfill people’sdemand. Based on this situation, the Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) was bornnaturally. There were many schools have researches on Multimodal Discourse Analysis,and the social semiotic approach to Multimodal Discourse Analysis was developed veryfast.In the field of semiotic approach to Multimodal Analysis Discourse, the most famousscholars who have achieved great reward are Kress and Van Leeuwen. They put forwardthat the semiotic approach to Multimodal Discourse Analysis, which was based on theSystemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), extended the Functional Grammar to the analysisof multimodal discourse. In their book Reading Images---Visual Grammar, they putforwards the first systematic and comprehensive framework for analyzing multimodaldiscourse, which was based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (1978,2000),and they discussed the ways of meaning expression from three perspectives. In the past,people always made the researches from the perspective of literary criticism, film reviews,psychology, aesthetics and so on. However, the Multimodal Discourse Analysis hasprovided a set of methods to analyze the images, music and language.Grounded on this consideration, this thesis takes the perspective of social semiotic,and puts forwards that a variety of modalities,such as sound, image, gesture, animation,etc. all belong to social semiotic, and they achieve the three meta-functions---ideationalfunction, interpersonal function and textual function by different ways. Moreover, thispaper proves the possibility of correspondence between language and these modalities.Based on the theoretical framework of functional grammar and the visual grammar, theauthor proposes a framework for the multimodal discourse analysis on the film ForrestGump. Under the guidance of the framework, the multimodal discourse analysis on the film is done mainly from interactive meaning in visual grammar by contact, socialdistance, perspective and modality. The research uses qualitative approach with the help ofquantitative method, and takes shot as the basic unit. The author analyses that how imagesrealize the interactive meaning and how the verbal and visual modality are cooperatedcomprehensively.After the comprehensive discussion on the application of interactive meaning, thisthesis improves the limitation of Visual Grammar which focuses primarily on static image,and expands the application area of multimodal discourse analysis. Moreover, this papertestifies the feasibility of applying the theory of systemic functional linguistics into themultimodal filmic discourse. Practically, this thesis deepens human’s comprehension onthe multimodal discourse analysis and enhances people’s appreciation level on the filmForrest Gump.