| At present, Olympic Games are no more pure sports meetings but national events that have influence on culture, economics, and politics. As one of the famous visual images of Olympic Games, Olympic emblems are also special cultural symbols, and they greatly mirror diverse cultural characteristics and values of the host nation. Therefore, digging out what cultural connotations they have is not only conductive to a better understanding towards Olympic cultures, but also further exploration and reflection of different cultural values from nations around the world.Since1990s, studies of Olympic emblems have mainly been made from the perspective of historical backgrounds, artistic styles, and aesthetic characteristics, and until recently have they been conducted from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis (MDA). This thesis studies in detail the multimodal meanings of Olympic emblems with the help of visual grammar (VG), and further explores their cultural connotations.By choosing the emblems of2008Beijing Games and1988Seoul Games as representatives for the eastern culture, the emblems of2012London Games and1996Atlanta Games for the western culture, and the emblems of2016Rio Games and1968Mexico City Games for Latin American culture, this study begins with analyzing the multimodal meanings of the six emblems, and further explores cultural connotations they implied, after that, makes interpretation on them with the help of Robert J. House’s cultural value theory, and at last, makes conclusions of the similarities and differences that these connotations reflected among the eastern, western and Latin American cultures.This thesis has made, for the first time, tentative comprehensive and detailed multimodal analysis on Olympic emblems according to VG system. Through qualitative analysis, it is found that in the multimodal meanings all the six emblems represent Narrative Active Processes in representational meanings, belong to both type of "demand" and "offer" in the dimension of Contact, adopt frontal angle in the dimension of Perspective and present high Modality in interactive meanings, and high Salience in compositional meanings, perfectly fit the request of advertising effects. Vertically compared, the emblems of eastern and Latin American nations are the same in the dimension of Framing, which are contrary to the emblems of western nations. Horizontally compared there are certain differences between each two nations in same culture, mainly in the dimensions of Social Distance and Perspective in interactive meanings. In addition, this thesis has taken Olympic emblems as the pointcut to explore cultural values of different nations. Through making interpretations of the cultural connotations of Olympic emblems with cross-cultural theories, it can be concluded that: in the cultural dimensions of thinking patterns, power distance, and in-group collectivism, eastern and Latin American cultures are of similarities while western cultures are opposite to them; in the cultural dimensions of institutional collectivism and future orientation, eastern and western cultures are of similarities while Latin American cultures are opposite to them; in the cultural dimension of assertiveness, western and Latin American cultures are of similarities. Therefore, this thesis also makes conclusions of the similarities and differences of the eastern, western and Latin American cultures, which is different from usual studies of cultural values between eastern and western nations. In this sense, the significance of this thesis is to carrying forward cultural inheritance and having a new try on the study of cross-cultural communication.Olympic emblems show the most valuable essence in different cultural traditions. Studying their connotations is not only helpful to comprehensive understandings towards MDA and different cultural values of diverse nations, but also to appreciation of the design of emblems and to fostering the awareness of cross-cultural communication. |
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