A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of English Texts With Pictures About "Dunhuang Feitian"

Along with the increasingly important status of tourism in the overall social development, effective propagandizing is becoming more and more important, and technology especially the multimedia technology has made the meaning resources in propaganda extend from mono language to multiple communication modes. This meaning-making process is neither monomodal language nor mono image presentation but multimodal presentation with involvement and interaction of at least two semiotic resources. The traditional discourse analysis mainly focuses on the element of language to interpret the meaning-making and communication, while the multimodal discourse analysis can make the analysis more comprehensive from the perspective of multiple communication modes.Multimodal Discourse is an integration of a variety of communication modes, such as voice, text, images, etc., to deliver information in a discourse. Multilmodal discourse analysis (MDA) is to take representational, interactive and compositional meanings of the various semiotic resources into consideration, study the intersemiotic complementary in the meaning-making process, and analyze how they work together to create a complete discourse or communicative event, and it is the case to tourism texts or information as well. As an effective way to analyze multimodal discourse, although MDA has been applied to diverse research objects such as verbal texts, hypertexts as well as dynamic materials, few researches adopt MDA to such materials as English texts with pictures about "Dunhuang Feitian"(DF).As one of the most typical representatives of tourism and culture of Dunhuang city and Gansu, how to present DF in an appropriate and effective way to the world is of high value in Gansu tourism. This thesis collects forty-three English Texts with Pictures about DF which are further classified and attempts to adopt Kress&Van Leeuwen’s visual grammar to these texts to analyze the representational meaning, the interactive meaning and the compositional meaning labeled in the image mode and verbal mode about DF, and how images and words work together to create a synergy effect through the intersemiotic complementary. Although Visual Grammar (VG) itself includes the analysis of verbal mode, the thesis also adopts Royce’s intersemiotic complementary theory to further interpret the interaction between the image mode and verbal mode and analyze the complementary relationship.This thesis includes six chapters. Chapter one briefly introduces the background of the research, the significance of the research and organization of the thesis. Chapter two reviews the multimodal discourse analysis and the researches about DF to illustrate the reason and significance of MDA of English Texts with Pictures about DF. Chapter three explicates the theoretical foundations of VG and intersemiotic complementary. Chapter four presents the objectives of this research, the research method and the data collection and classification. Chapter five conducts a practical multimodal discourse analysis of the texts about DF. Chapter six concludes the research by summarizing major findings and the theoretical and practical contributions of this research, and also by pointing out the limitations and offering the suggestions for further investigations.As a tentative research, the thesis illustrates through the analysis that it’s applicable and practical to adopt the frameworks of VG to analyze such texts as English Texts with Pictures about DF from the perspective of multimodality. It has been found that, in such multimodal texts, image mode and verbal mode are not combined in a simple way but integrated into complementary entirety in the process of meaning-making and information presentation, and the research puts forward some suggestions to tourism propaganda.