Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Meaning Construction In Music Video

A large amount of studies on music video are mainly about English teaching,semiotics, ideology, artistic factor and software-making aspects both home and abroad,but a few of them are on its meaning construction. Knowledge about meaningconstruction in music video is fundamental and significant in helping the audience betterunderstand the meaning of music video and the creators or designers producehigher-quality music video. The study on meaning construction of music video has boththeoretical value and practical significance. Music video is a typical multimodaldiscourse, usually containing visual modality, aural modality and language modality.Therefore, based on the multimodal angle, the meaning construction of music video couldbe revealed much clearer and more comprehensive.This thesis takes “Rolling in the Deep” as data which gains three awards: Record ofthe Year, Song of the Year, and Short Music Video of the Year in54th Grammy Awardsknown as “Music Oscar Award”. This MV describes the painful feelings from hurt oflove and belongs to lyrical type of music video, which is the main type among all kindsof MV. In this sense, the music video of “Rolling in the Deep” is relatively representativeand typical. Through extracting the lyrics and key shots from the music video “Rolling inthe Deep”, this thesis studies meaning construction in music video from visual, aural andlanguage modality aspects by taking qualitative and quantitative methods.After analyzing the data, this thesis observes that language modality, visual modalityand aural modality are all important for meaning construction in music video. Nowadays,lyrical MV is featured by its collage and fragmentation. The abstract and intangible musicabounding with emotional attributes inherently foresees the collage and incoherent plotsin visual representation of lyrical MV. Compared with the abstract music and incoherentimages, language is relatively concrete and stable. By using words with associativemeaning and hiding agent intentionally and referring to theme ambiguously, theimaginary space is extended largely. Through rhyming the same vowel as the one in the title and using transitivity system, the theme could be better identified. The momentum isenhanced by repeating fragments or whole paragraphs and using declarative andimperative sentence patterns recurrently. Besides, visual and aural modalities are alsoimportant for meaning construction in music video. The sub-modalities in the visualmodality such as gesture, costume, light and color can deepen the theme, set the tone andidentify the participant s mood. The tone of the participant and musical instruments, thesole or cooperating playing of instruments and the chorus in aural modality can shape theparticipant s image, create resonance with the audience and strengthen the expressiveforce of music video in art. It is the cooperation of the three modalities that builds thecomplete meaning in music video.This thesis analyzes how different modalities function together in themeaning-construction process, which makes up for the ignorance of the completemeaning construction in music video. However, the collected data is limited and thisthesis mainly adopts qualitative analysis method, there exists some limitations in theconclusion.