Meaning Construction Of Multimodal Environmental News Discourse

Today is a new era of multimodal communication, and the traditional way of literacy inthe era of new media is not enough to be able to fulfill the new requirements of reading theinformation presented by a variety of media and modalities. Matthiessen (2007) said,“In theentire course of human evolution, multimodality exists in all aspects of human life.” As weknow, discourse is the representation of the meaning made by human beings and it generatesfrom the multimodality, and its interpretation inevitably proceeds with it. The multimodaldiscourse is not only a product of the information age, but also provides a new perspective forthe discourse analysis. News discourse, as a kind of public discourse, has changed thetraditional single way to report only by language; the integration between language and imageis everywhere. Environment News, as a separate subject, is developed rapidly and positivelyand has a strong social influence. The so-called environmental news refers to the news reportabout the main environmental issues, that is, to spread current environmental informationwhich people are concerned and related by the means of news. Throughout the study of newsdiscourse analysis, most studies we have done only on language itself, usually concentrate onthe meaning making of language, ignoring the analysis of other semiotic resources, such asimage, color and so on. The research of environmental news as data remains blank.This thesis makes an attempt to analyze the meaning construction of the multimodalenvironment news discourse. Based on the theory of systemic functional grammar,“Languageis a social symbol, and the three metafunctions of language”, adopting Kress&vanLeeuwen’s social semiotic framework visual communication, respectively, the study firstfocuses on how the language and images, and other visual symbols express its meaning in themultimodal environment news discourse respectively and how they work together to makecontributions to make meaning. Then it tries to explain and prove how these semioticresources integrate to reflect the features of objectivity, predictability and risk ofenvironmental news, which aims to help readers clearly see the news and the facts, interacteffectively, and show reporters’ attitudes and ideologies with appropriate composition andguide readers to understand the significance of the discourse by the greatest extent. It showsthat the theories of the systemic functional grammar and visual grammar have a strongexplanatory power to analyze the multimodal environmental news. It is helpful for people togive insights to environment news discourse. The author aims to hope to make a slender contribution to the research field of multimodal discourse analysis, and meanwhile providereference and guidance to analyzing environmental news.