Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Movie Posters

With the rapid development and update of the mass media and Internet, the ways of getting information isbecoming more and more widely. Language and words are not the only way to transfer information, but frommono-modality to the multimodality, which including the images, sounds, motion, color and other modalities. Atthe same time, the traditional method, which is restricted to language, can not give a comprehensive account forthe multimodal discourse. So it is necessary to formulate a new research method to analyze different modalitiesin a discourse. In1990s, the Visual Grammar, proposed by Kress and Van Leeuwen, provides a comprehensiveframework for the multimodal discourse.This thesis is based on Kress&Van Leeuwen’ Visual Grammar and Halliday’s Systemic FunctionalGrammar to analyze images, color, words of two movie posters(Lost on Journey and Lost in Thailand). The mainresearch methods adopted in this thesis are qualitative method and descriptive method. First, the researcheranalyzes the representative meaning of the images in the posters from the perspectives of narrative process andconceptional process. Then the researcher studies the interactive meaning of the images through contact, socialdistance, attitude and modality. At last, the compositional meaning is analyzed in terms of information value,salience and frame. After analyzing three meanings of images in two posters, the researcher uses Halliday’sSystemic Functional Grammar to analyze two posters’ words in order to get a better understanding about twoposter’s meaning. Next, there is a comparison between two posters from images and words, which tends toprovide how images, words, color and other modalities construct a multimodal discourse, and the similarities anddifferences between two posters.All in all, this thesis can validate the applicability and practicality of Visual Grammar in analyzing movieposters, which is a multimodal discourse that including images, words and color. Then, this thesis provides ascientific model for the further research about movie posters. At last, based on two posters’ comparison, themovie poster producers can figure out that it is not enough to design posters using scientific theories, but need tomake some changes about represented participants according to the movies in order to highlight the theme of themovie.