Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Production Promotion Release Conference

Production promotion release conference(hence PPRC) is a new kind ofproduction promotion way, which after the TV commercial and outdoor advertising inrecent years. PPRC rose from some large IT transnational corporations in Europe andU.S, like Apple and Microsoft etc. As a new kind of advertising form, PPRC gainedwidely high praise by the media and audiences, and also got excellent advertisingeffects. Especially for the Apple Inc, every PPRC of Apple attracted worldwidemedia’s attention. In recent years, some IT companies in China also followed this trendto use PPRC for advertising. By using PPRC to advertise new production before itsofficial launch, the production promotion got its success. PPRC applied manymultimodal discourses like audio, video, PPT etc. Those social semiotics are more andmore involved in the meaning construction of practice discourse, thus constituted themultimodality of discourse.As a part of Critical Discourse Analysis, Multimodal discourse analysis isexplored and probed under the tradition of Systemic Functional Grammar and SocialSemiotism. Among those research, the most representative is Visual Grammar whichwas found by Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996,2006). Baldry and Thibault (2000,2004)set up a framework of analyzing advertising video. O’Halloran (2004) also tried to setup a detailed framework for movie analysis and made tentative analysis with somemovies. The Multimodal discourse analysis of movie text is considered as a difficultand complex subject, due to the involvement of multiple semiotic modal systems andthe changes of these system also change in the process of meaning construction underthe flow of dynamic text. For this reason, the study of multimodal discourse analysisof PPRC has both theoretical and practical meaning.This paper selects PPRC which includes static stage background, PPT and activevideo demonstration as research object, under the framework of Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar. The research is done by employing both the qualitativeand the quantitative method with the main content as follows: firstly, make a definitionof multimodal discourse analysis and analyze the research status. Analyze multimodaldiscourse of the PPRC of Apple Inc, and point out the goal and the significance of theresearch; secondly, set up a framework which applied the multimodal discourseanalysis of the PPRC of Apple Inc under the framework of Systematic Grammar andVisual Grammar; thirdly, analyze the static background, PPT and active videodemonstration under the proposed framework of three meanings respectively. Explorethe difference in meaning expression of different discourse and find out the expressionfeatures. And also provide methods and strategies for better understanding ofmultimodal discourse. After the analysis, the author found that: the dynamic discourseshave more advantages than the static discourses in narrative meanings. On the onehand, the dynamic discourses are more easily to form vectors; on the other hand, thedynamic discourses are more flexible and expressive than static discourses no matterin the action process or the reactional process. And for the interactive meaning and thecompositional meaning, especially for the expressive force of PPRC, dynamicdiscourses and static discourses have their own features, they are put together to bringout the best in each other.The research reaches the expectation, and testified the applicability of the MDAof PPRC. It can help the audiences to comprehend the modality which can expose thetheme meaning of multimodal discourse rather than words. Due to the limited capacityof the author, this thesis still has some limitations and inadequacies, which needs morescholars in this field offering more supports and advices.