A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The English Version Of The Documentary A Bite Of China

Documentary is an art form based on real life and a typical type of multimodal discourse that integrates a variety of social symbolic resources. A Bite of China, CCTV’s documentary series on food have been well-received for its perfect combination of local Chinese cuisines with related stories presented. The current study chooses the English version of this particular documentary as the object, with the aim to analyze how meaning is realized through visual, verbal and audio modality and to discover how the three basic modalities work together to achieve an integrative meaning.This research adopts a mixed design, in which qualitative approach was dominated with supplement of quantitative one. The materials are six shots selected from the documentary A Bite of China, and multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) was conducted from the three meta-functional perspectives on the theoretical basis of Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar and of O’Halloran’s filmic discourse analysis framework. Mise-en-scene (the shot) was taken as one unit in the analysis of the documentary. Three to six frames in each selected shot were analyzed in terms of three basic modalities including images, music, text, color, etc. so as to figure out how the three meta-functional meanings are realized. The way modalities correlate to achieve the interactive meaning of the documentary was also explored in the analysis.This MDA research is a new try to analyze filmic discourse, providing new evidence to the applicability of Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar theory and O’Halloran’s filmic theory in dynamic texts. The findings yielded from MDA include:In the first place, not all modes proposed in O’Halloran’s theory appear in the same shot and the modes are constantly changing in dynamic texts. In the second, the various modalities are complementary in that they work together to achieve’an integrative meaning through representational, interactive and compositional realization.The practical significance of this research are as follows:Firstly, in terms of pedagogical implication, multimodal discourse is the learning resource more adaptable to the characteristics of learners in this Network Era as learners have better access to acquire information through the dynamic texts. Secondly, in terms of cultural transmission, the MDA of this documentary will enlighten relevant personnel to pay more attention to the interaction among different modalities while making cultural promotion videos so as to adapt them to the taste of foreign audience.