A Multimodal Analysis On The Filmic Discourse Of Brave Heart

Multimodal discourse refers to those discourses that generate the integrative meaning through the interaction of two or more semiotic modes of communication, for example, language, dynamic and static visual images, music, sound, electronic media, film, print, as well as even architecture and three-dimensional objects etc. From the late20century, scholars home and abroad have begun their widespread research on the multimodal discourse analysis in the field of linguistic research.In the field of multimodal discourse analysis, Halliday’s Functional Grammar is widely regarded as the original theoretical basis. He considers language as social semiotic system and there are three types of the meta-functions of language. Functional Grammar is used for reference by Kress, G. and T. Van Leeuwen to make their efforts to analyse multimodal discourse, and is finally formed the theoretical basis of Visual Grammar. Visual Grammar extended from Functional Grammar is preferred to conduct the practical multimodal analysis on visual images and even auditive modalities. Kress, G.and T. Van Leeuwen argue that both visual modalities and auditive modalities are also social semiotic resources like language and they also represent three meta-meaning. Furthermore, the combination of different modalities also can be discussed in the Framework of Visual Grammar.The author chooses the filmic discourse of Brave Heart as data to realize the multimodal analysis. First, some sections of movie lines are selected as examples to analyse the three meta-functions of language in the frame of Functional Grammar. Second, in the frame of Visual Grammar, some pictures from the movie are collected to conduct a practical multimodal analysis on the visual modalities of Brave Heart from representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning. Based on the Functional Grammar and Visual Grammar, author attempts to form a proposed framework to conduct the multimodal analysis on Brave Heart. Finally, a synthetic analysis of the interaction of auditive modalities and visual modalities contributing to the overall meaning conveyed by Brave Heart is focused on.The purpose of the research achieves the expected goal through the case study of Brave Heart. Visual Grammar derived from functional grammar by Halliday is testified to be feasible to make multimodal analysis on the filmic discourse. The research also attempts to strengthen people’s capability to analyze the discourse in which many different modalities interact and convey the integrative meaning.