A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Family Album U.S.A

The arrival of new media era marks that text is no longer the only channel to expressmeaning. A variety of non-verbal modality forms all play indispensible roles in generating theintegrative meaning of a discourse. The study field of discourse analysis is expanded fromtext to multimodal discourse, and under this situation, multimodal discourse analysis begins toemerge. Present studies on multimodal discourse analysis focus more on subjective analysis.And the researches on the relationships of various modality forms are lack of scientificexploration. Given the above considerations, the present study takes multimedia materialsFamily Album U.S.A. as the data source to conduct empirical research on the dynamicdiscourse meaning and the relationships between various modalities.The theoretical framework of the present study is based on Kress&van Leeuwen’sVisual Grammar. It is a grammatical system for interpreting visual modality derived fromHalliday’s Metafunctions, the core of which is representational, interactive, and compositionalmeaning.The present study adopts both quantitative and qualitative research approaches to carryout a case study of Family Album U.S.A. through the following steps. Firstly, the authorinterprets the representational meaning of Family Album U.S.A. from the aspects of actionprocess and reactional process, analyzes the interactive meaning from the perspective ofcontact, social distance, perspectives and modality, and elaborates the compositional meaningin terms of information value, salience and framing. Secondly, the author classifies themodality forms in Family Album U.S.A. to clear up their relationship when constructingintegrative meaning. Finally, based on the comprehensive framework established in this study,the author makes a synthetic analysis of several continuous frames in the same shot to testifyits feasibility and encode how the dynamic meanings are constructed by various semioticresources.The study results indicate that the established theoretical framework based on VisualGrammar is applicable for filmic discourse analysis. Firstly, all types of modality formsincluding text, image, sound and environment play its particular role in the integratedmeaning construction. Specifically speaking, in Family Album U.S.A. the representationalmeaning is mainly realized by narrative process, in which action and reactional process aremore common than verbal and mental process. The interactive meaning is achieved throughoffering act，impersonal social distance，horizontal perspectives and high modality; thecompositional meaning reflects in rich expression means of framing. Secondly, the relationship of different modality forms could be divided into strengthening andnon-strengthening complementary and non-complementary relationships.To a certain degree, the present study expands the field of multimodal discourse analysis.It is of prime practical importance to improve the quality of language educational videos andthe audiences’ appreciation level; furthermore, the present study also has instructivesignificance in the establishment of dynamic language learning model.