Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Film Great Expectations

With the update of multimedia technology, multimodal discourse analysis (MDA)is created and offers a creative perspective for linguistic research. Film as newbornmedia brings us the fresh culture and communication. What’s more, film also providesus with new materials of linguistic research, which expands the corpus. The topic of thisthesis is about multimodal filmic discourse analysis, which is based on Halliday’sSystemic Functional Linguistics and Kress&van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar (VG). Weagree that linguistic research should not be confined to the pure language research,while the images, sound and other modes all should be applied as social symbols incommunications.Among all linguistic texts for research, literary masterpieces with their highreference value have caught more attention than other materials. On the200thanniversary of the great British writer Charles Dickens’s birth, this thesis chooses thelatest adapted film Great Expectations (2012version) as research materials to exploreVisual Grammar (representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositionalmeaning) and multimodal discourse analysis. Quantitative analysis and qualitativeanalysis were applied in this thesis. The creative point of this thesis is not only toexplain the three kinds of meanings in Visual Grammar separately, but also offers asynthetic analysis by combining various modes of the three kinds of meanings of VisualGrammar.By the multimodal filmic discourse analysis, this thesis aims to analyze therelationships among the three kinds of meanings in Visual Grammar, which will offer anew perspective to appreciate literary works and linguistic research.