| Multimodal discourse refers to the phenomenon of communicating with multiplemeans or modalities such as language, images, sounds and movements through auditorychannel, visual channel, tactile channel, and olfactory channel, etc. sensory channels.From the perspective of functional social semiotics, people believe that other semioticresources beyond language can also construct social meanings and social relations aslanguage do. Since the end of20th century, there appeared an upsurge of studies onmultimodal discourse in the international linguistic field. And language is no longerconsidered as a semiotic system to make meaning in isolation, but expresses variousmeanings in combination with the image and other semiotic systems. In this dissertation,the author shall deploy the Attitude system of Appraisal Theory within SystemicFunctional Linguistics and the Interactive meaning in Visual Grammar from theperspective of social semiotics to explore the interpersonal meaning constructionbetween the writers and the readers of these30pieces of Letter to Shareholders inannual reports which are collected from30the Fortune2011Global500Americancompanies by analyzing the writers’ language and their images respectively. Each of the30collected letters should have the Chairman, President or CEO’s images contained init.After analyzing the language and images of the30multimodal discourses of Letterto Shareholders, the findings are as follows:1) The analysis of verbiage in the letters from the Appraisal’s Attitude systemshows: a.97.44%Attitude resources are positive; the Judgement resources whichevaluate people or people’s behaviors take the largest percentage (53.69%) in Attituderesources. The findings show that the writers of the letters, that is, the chairmen,presidents or CEOs, use a large amount of positive Attitude resources to disclose thecompany’s information, and they emphasize particularly on positively evaluate thecompany’s and employees’ behaviors to project a favorable image of strength,potentiality, and social responsibility for their companies, so as to arouse the positiveassessment and agreement from the readers with the writers’ companies as well asconstruct a positive interpersonal meaning between the writers and the readers. b. InAffect resources, the percentages of the distributions of Satisfaction resources (36.46%),Happiness resources (31.25%) and Security resources (26.04%) are of little differences. In Judgement resources, the percentage of Social Esteem resources which deals with thenormality, capacity and tenacity of people is the biggest (87.46%), and the Capacityresources under the category of the Social Esteem have a dominant presence (73.43%)in Judgement resources. In Appreciation resources, the Evaluation resources whichevaluate the importance and valuation of things account for54.40%of Appreciation.The above statistics show that the chairmen, presidents or CEOs are willing to expresssatisfaction, confidence and pride towards their companies and employees, and they aremore inclined to positively evaluate their employees’ capacity as well as positivelyevaluate the importance and valuation of things that the company has done in last yearlike the results achieved or projects completed, etc. to the development of theircompanies, so as to convey to the readers positive attitude, and create an image for thecompany with strong strength and capacity, which not only helps to attract the potentialinvestors, but also constructs positive interpersonal meanings between the writers andthe readers.2) The analysis of chairmen’s, presidents’ or CEOs’ images in letters from theVisual Grammar’s Interactive meaning shows: a. With regard to the Contact factor ofInteractive meaning,72.22%of the images are demand images in which the representedparticipants gaze at the viewer. These demand images indicate that the chairmen,presidents or CEOs in images look forward to establishing an imaginarily friendlyrelationship with the viewer. b. As for the Social distance factor of Interactive meaning,50%of the images belong to the medium shot which represents the social relationship(medium-level intimate relationship) between the represented participants in images andthe viewer. The above finding shows that most of the chairmen, presidents or CEOs tendto establish a medium-level intimate relationship or intimate personal relationship withthe viewer. c. The Attitude factor of Interactive meaning of the image is reflected fromthe perspectives that the images are presented. From the horizontal perspective,83.33%images are frontal angle images in which the represented participants are facing at theviewer. From the vertical perspective,94.44%images are eye-level images in which therepresented participants are seen from an eye-level angle. It indicates that mostchairmen, presidents or CEOs hope the viewer involved into their world depicted in theimages equally and hope to construct an equal and friendly interpersonal meaning withthe viewer.To sum up, the present study shows that in the multimodal discourse of Letter toShareholders, the writers’ language and their images have the complementary and co-occurrence relations in the interpersonal meaning construction in the discourse. Thechairmen’s, presidents’ or CEOs’ language and their images are designed incombination to make the readers/viewers actively participate in the story constructed inthe multimodal discourse of the Letter to Shareholders, which not only discloses thecompany’s information, maintains or creates a favorable image for the company and forthe Chairman, President or CEO himself/herself, but also constructs and conveys apositive and friendly interpersonal relationship between the writer and thereader/viewer.This study is the first attempt to analysis the language and visual images incombination in the Letter to Shareholders from a multimodal discourse approach, whichnot only extends the perspectives of studies on this kind of genre, but also develops theapplication of Multimodal Discourse Analysis that drawn on Appraisal Theory andVisual Grammar in a new genre and area as well as provides some reference andinspirations for English Letter to Shareholders writing and designing. |
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