The Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Interpersonal Meaning Of Obama’s Campaign Video "Forward"in2012

With the rapid growth of technology and information, as well as the widely use of Internet, language is no longer the only source of meaning. Images, sounds, colors and various non-verbal resources play a significant role in constructing the meaning. Therefore, in order to have a better understanding of different modalities in the process of meaning making, multimodal discourse analysis has emerged since1990s.This thesis chooses the video of Obama’s general election campaign in2012as the data, which is obviously a multimodal resource including words, images, music, captions, etc. The thesis aims at studying how interpersonal meaning is constructed by two main modalities in the video:verbal modality and visual modality. Halliday’s Systemic-functional Grammar and its extension Appraisal Theory will be employed in analyzing the language and Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar will be used to analyze the images. What’s more, their internal relationships and how they interact with each other in making the whole meaning will also be studied.The thesis will use quantitative and qualitative research methods, but mainly qualitative method. For the analysis of the interpersonal meaning of the language, mood, modality and attitude system will be analyzed by simple statistics along with qualitative analysis. With regard to the analysis of the images, film segmentation method will be adopted in order to make the analysis more reasonable and feasible.The analysis reveals that the verbal modality and visual modality convey their interpersonal meanings respectively in the video to persuade potential voters for Obama. Their relations are specification, explanation and complement. They co-exist, work together to form the overall interpersonal meaning of the video.This thesis tries to prove the feasibility and applicability of the Systemic-functional Grammar. Appraisal Theory and Visual Grammar in the process of analyzing the interpersonal meaning of the campaign video. In addition, it attempts to. make readers understand how this campaign video influences the public political opinions, shedding some lights on producing similar videos.