Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of National Identities In American Newspapers

Since the appearance of discourse analysis in the early1950s, it has been largely employed to analyze advertisements, conversations, and literary texts and so on. Its rapid development has proved its explanatory power. Nevertheless, with the development of technology and other means in communication, it is increasingly evident that the analysis of verbiage alone is no longer enough. Such semiotic modes as image, music, sound, and gesture can also used to transfer message. And the Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) is proposed to study the texts where different semiotic modes work together. To date, it has been applied to examine films, blogs, course books, and dictionaries and so on. The present study applies MDA to explore the Americans’national identities in American newspapers, by employing visual grammar and meta-functions to respectively analyze images and language in three reports about President Obama’s re-election success, with an emphasis on the analysis of images.The newspaper, though been influenced by TV, radio and computer, still remains as an indispensable source of news. And the national identities, qualities and nature possessed by a nation, represented in newspapers have rarely been observed. As for the MDA, Halliday’s social systemic functional grammar has laid the foundation and has remained the main theoretical framework for it. MDA is referred as the interpretation of meaning that relies on more than one semiotic mode in communication. This thesis, as mentioned above, analyzing identities of newspapers in light of MDA, by deploying meta-function theory in analyzing texts of three news reports in such newspapers as Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, and employing visual grammar in analyzing images, will give a analysis on how the meta-functions of reports on newspapers are construed; how the mechanism of texts and images works; which national identities have been construed through the meta-functions of the three reports.It is concluded that news reports from the newspapers with pictures and texts can present a dynamic representation of ideational relation between depicted participants, interactive relation between the represented participants and interactive participants. And the meta-functions of the three reports on newspapers are construed through the combination of the three meanings in both the images and the language. Besides, the ways how the mechanism of the images and the texts work together depend on the relationships between the three meanings of the images and those of the language. Also The three reports display that American people are strong, optimistic, tough, united, willing to have dreams. Standing for the interests of Americans, these American newspapers are heavily inclined to demonstrate the bright side of Americans without a single doubt.