Multimodal Analysis On Movie Kung Fu Panda From Perspective Of Visual Grammar And Study On Relationships Among Modalities In The Movie

Multimodal discourse analysis is a new approach different from traditional discourse analysis, whose target is all the social symbols which constitute discourse meaning. Kress&Van Leeuwen (1996) put forward Visual Grammar for the analysis of visual image. Later on, lots of linguists are trying to apply its framework to study all kinds of discourse, including video and audio discourse.Based on the framework of Visual Grammar, the present paper took up a study on the overall meaning construction of movie Kung Fu Panda from three aspects: representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning. The study took28shots segmented from the movie as the unit of analysis and adopted the methods of qualitative research and case analysis. Besides, other three shots were segmented from the movie to study the roles that involved modalities play in the shots and their relationships. The present research tried to answer the following two questions:(1) How to analyze movie Kung Fu Panda under the framework of Visual Grammar?(2) What relationships among modalities are there in movie Kung Fu Panda and what roles modalities play in the shots?By synthesizing and analyzing the data, the following conclusions are reached:(1) The representational meaning of the movie is composed of narrative image and conceptual image, in which the former one presents a kind of interaction between the presented participants and other participants through an action formed by such means of saying or doing something, or by means of gaze system, gesture, facial expression; while in the latter one, the representation of participants is achieved through circumstance of location, circumstance of accompaniment, circumstance of means and identity. The interactive meaning of the movie can be showed in four expects:contact act deals with the relationship between the intended meaning of the act and audiences; social distance shows different social relationships; attitude manifests different status and power through different photographing angles; modality presents different degrees of authenticity. The compositional meaning is mainly achieved by two elements:information value is achieved by the replacement of information; salience unfolded different degrees of attraction of different information.(2) The involved modals in movie Kung Fu Panda are complementary to each other for the absence of any involved modal will lead to the failure of meaning construction. Besides, even though the involved modalities are inseparable to each other in the same shot, they play different roles in the meaning construction. Some modals plays the main role, others play the secondary role. From the analysis, we can get that image modality plays the main role in movie Kung Fu Panda, and other modals play the secondary role which can supplement the main modal, or can strengthen the function of the main role in meaning construction, on the purpose of creating a vivid and authentic scenario and achieving the effects of humor and amusement.The research further verified the feasibility to analyze dynamic filmic discourse under the framework of Visual Grammar, which not only expands the research scope of multimodal discourse analysis, but also provides a new angle for audiences to appreciate the movie. The research in the present paper has achieved the desired purpose with important practical significances.