A Multisemiotic Analysis Of Website Discourse With Chinaculture.Org As An Example

Today, we live in a digital and information age. The emergence of new technology has brought great changes to human life. With the development of modern technology, great changes have taken place in the usage of communication mode and communication media. Language is no longer taken as the only way to express meanings. In the process of communication, people often use a variety of semiotics simultaneously to express meanings. In many cases, language and other semiotic resources construe meanings together. All kinds of modals serve to achieve the successful communication in an integrated way.Furthermore, the communicative channel by which people get to know the world is getting more and more diverse. Through the Internet people have easy access to the cultures of different countries, which makes cultural communication become more and more convenient. Currently, the Internet has lead to the fusion and reform of the world culture. Therefore, the network plays an important role in reshaping international communication of national culture.This thesis chooses the homepage of Chinaculture.org as the study object in order to figure out how the three metafunctional meanings are realized on the homepage and how they work together to construe the integrated meaning of the whole homepage.The theoretical framework of this thesis is Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar, which is an extension of Halliday’s Systemic Functional linguistics. According to Visual Grammar, a multisemiotic discourse has three metafunctional meanings; they are representational meaning, interactional meaning and compositional meaning, corresponding to Halliday’s three metafunctions.This study adopts a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods so as to make an analysis of the homepage of Chinaculture.org from a multisemiotic perspective. First, the thesis makes a detailed analysis of the homepage from the three metafunctional meanings. Second, the thesis tries to figure out how the three metafunctional meanings are realized in the homepage of Chinaculture.org. Finally, it conducts a synthetic analysis by regarding the whole homepage as a large modal in order to find out how the three meanings work together to construe an integrated meaning.The research results have proved that Kress and Van Leuwen’s Visual Grammar is feasible, effective and applicable to the analysis of the homepage of Chinaculture.org from a multsemiotic perspective. The study of the thesis provides the English readers with a unique perspective to interpret the meanings that Chinaculture.org tries to convey in a more comprehensive way. Furthermore, the present study is an effort towards the future research on multisemiotic discourse analysis of official cultural websites.