Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of FIFA World Cup Emblems

With the rapid advancement of science, technology and multimedia, people’s ways of communication have presented a multimodal trend. Many semiotic resources have been frequently employed in daily interactions. The multimodal discourse not only involves texts, but contains image, sound, color, tables, etc. Multimodal discourse analysis is inspired by Halliday’s viewpoint in language. Language itself is a kind of special social semiotic system. Besides the language, the other semiotic resources can also make meaning. Multimodal discourse is a discourse whose meanings are realized through more than one semiotic code. Visual Grammar, based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, emphasizes the integration functions of images, color, sound and other semiotic resources such as visual, auditive, tactile, olfactory and gustatory when dealing with discourse analysis. Visual Grammar also involves three metafunctions, namely, representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning, which offers the theoretical foundation and method for multimodal discourse analysis.The World Cup is one of the most popular sport events in the world, which has become a sort of culture and also a social phenomenon. The official World Cup emblem, an indispensable component of the World Cup, is the symbol of World Cup and the cultural carrier of different countries. The emblems not only demonstrate the spirits of sports, display national history, ie. but also present their own cultural and historical characteristics of their countries with its color, image and written language. The World Cup emblems consist of image, characters and color according to the explanations offered by FIFA official website. According to Kress and Van Leeuwen’s idea on multimodal discourse, the World Cup Emblems are a typical multimodal discourse. The thesis chooses the World Cup emblems and regards them as multimodal discourse.The thesis intends to employ the Visual Grammar of Kress and Van Leeuwen, and chooses the FIFA official World Cup emblems as the objects of analysis and mainly uses the qualitative approach which combines theoretical study with the emblems. The first official emblem was designed and released in1974by West Germany, and the following World Cups have designed their own distinctive emblems every four years since1974. This thesis will mainly focus on eleven emblems from1974to2014. All the emblems are perceived not only in verbal language but also together with modes such as image, color and format design. This thesis will make a multimodal discourse analysis of the World Cup emblems in terms of representational meaning, interactive meaning, and compositional meaning, and make a study of how different semiotic resources work together to make meaning which may help readers understand the connotations of World Cup emblems. In the meantime, it can offer the readers a basic and comprehensive understanding of the theory of multimodal discourse analysis.