Multimodal Discourse Analysis-with News Reports On The30th Olympic Games As Example

With the constant development of science and technology, as well as the changing ofpeople’s reading habits, medium of information delivery has become more and more diverse.Apart from language resources, other resources such as image, sound, color and typographyare playing increasingly important roles in meaning construction and interpretation.Multimodality is a feature of natural discourse, and is increasingly becoming a major way oftransmission in the news media.Recently, some scholars inspired by Halliday’s social semiotics, attempted to expandsocial semiotic characteristics in language to various other modes of communication, such asimages, sounds, and conducted a series of related researches. Among them, linguistsrepresented by Kress and van Leeuwen created a theoretical modal to the analysis of imagemeaning and function in light of tri-metafunctional hypothesis in systemic functionalgrammar.Previous studies on news reports generally take language itself or the structure ofdiscourse as their subjects, investigating the meaning conveyed in the linguistic informationand to some degree, neglecting the specific operational modes and effects of visual messagesin the construction of meaning. Based on eight news reports selected on the official website ofthe30thOlympic Games as the data for analysis, the thesis first explores how the meaning isrealized through the Visual Message Elements (VMEs) in the images on the basis of VisualGrammar (VG) proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen, and then relates these VMEs to theverbal information in the analysis of the operating mechanisms as well as interactive modesbetween images and words in the construction of meaning and function following the theoryof intersemiotic complementarity proposed by Royce.Through observation and analysis on the data, the present study arrives at the followingconclusions: Images and words in multimodal news reports mainly interact with each otherthrough intersemiotic meaning reiteration in terms of the repetition, synonymy, hyponymyand meronymy. Images and words function on each other through intersemiotic enhancementand elaboration.The study verified the feasibility and effectiveness of multimodal analytical framework on the analysis of news discourse, and provided some practical evidence to the analysis ofintersemiotic meaning construction on news reports. Moreover, the discussion may helpreaders to achieve a better understanding of the intended message conveyed in the image andlanguage, and fully grasp the overall meaning of multimodal news discourse.