On The Application Of Animation In Crime News Reporting

This thesis echoes an urgent need in the field of the application of multimodality inanimations in crimes news reporting. Over the last few decades, we have been witnessingrapid development of information technology. Communication means between people is nolonger only by language but gradually multimodalized, including image, color, sound, gestureetc. This means that modern discourse analysis should pay attention to all kinds of semioticresources systems. Multimodal discourse analysis, which started in the90s of the last centuryin the west, is a new approach to discourse analysis based on Halliday’s systemic functionalgrammar. It investigates how two or more semiotic systems work together in the process ofintegrative meaning-making to create a complete discourse or communicative event.As a kind of discourse genre, crime news reporting has the remarkable features ofmultimodal discourse, i.e., the mixed use of language, images, color, etc. The traditionaldiscourse analysis of news reporting focuses on the language semiotic system, but neglectsthe study of other semiotic systems. Thus, based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar,Kress and van Leewuen’s Visual Grammar, and Royce’s Framework of Inter-semioticComplementarity, this thesis attempts to propose a model for the multimodal discourseanalysis of animations in crime news reporting. Under the guidance of the model,10animations in crime news reporting are analyzed for the case studies, which aims to interprethow the multimodalities work together in integrative meaning-making to achieve the bestreporting effects through discussing the Ideational, Interpersonal and Textual metafunctionsof the verbal modality and the Representational, interactive and Compositional meanings ofvisual image modality in the animations. The analysis approach adopted for this thesis reliesmainly on qualitative analysis while takes quantitative analysis as secondary reliance. All thecases are collected from internet.This thesis has, firstly, found that there exist significant effect variances when the same crime news is presented by animation-based format and the page-based one. These differenteffects lie in the following aspects:(i) preference level;(ii) understanding of the news content;(iii) tendency of witnessing imaginarily;(iv) warning strength of the crime. Secondly, thisthesis has introduced the theoretical framework of the multimodal discourse analysis andverifies the applicability and feasibility of the theoretical framework in interpreting themeaning of animations in crime news reporting. The characteristics of conciseness andobjectivity in crime news reporting discourse require the designers and the viewers to have ahigh awareness and ability of multiliteracies. Therefore, this research is not only useful to thedesigner for using all kinds of modalities scientifically so as to achieve the best designs andexpression effects, but also can help the viewers to read the subjects expressed bycollaborative modalities comprehensively.