Dynamic Discourseapproached From A Multimodal Analysis Perspective

People can communicate and share information in rich ways, only one of whichis language. The traditional studies in discourse analysis lay stress on analyzing thelanguage system and semantic structure, with the exploration of other semioticsystems such as images, sounds, colors and flashes etc ignored. With the rapid growthof digital Internet and extensive use of multimedia technique, Multimodal DiscourseAnalysis (MDA) has become a topic of interest in discourse analysis. Multimodaldiscourses refer to the discourses that, with more than one physical sense includinghearing, sight, touch etc applied, generate the integrative meaning through theinteraction of two or more semiotic modes of communication, for example, sound,language, images, music, and movement etc; or a set of social practices which goesbeyond language as social semiotic and constructs meanings with two or moresemiotic resources such as language, music, space, and gesture and so forth.Building upon Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) Visual Grammar (VG) putforward in their book Reading Images which is derived from Systemic FunctionalLinguistics (SFL) pioneered by Halliday, the present study tries to employ a proposedmodel of MDA to analyze the regular occurrence in the micro film discourse: themultimodal discourse pattern such as moving images, music, language and color etcfrom the point of view of representative, interactive, and compositional meanings.The representative meaning can be mainly achieved by the narrative and conceptualprocesses; the interactive meaning by three elements, which is contact, social distance,and perspective; and the compositional meaning by the following three interrelatedsystems: information value, salience, and framing. The present study takes a look bothquantitatively and qualitatively at the film discourse to explain how multiple semioticresources including both verbal and visual semiotics involved in the four micro filmscollected work together to create meanings as a whole. By the multimodal analysis,we can more accurately understand the utterance meanings, and further find out howpeople in different areas achieve communicational purposes through multimodalmeans of communication. The multimodal discourse analysis of films mainly includes the researches onsemiotics such as film language, sight and sound etc. Through the case study of themicro film discourse, the thesis has proven that the MDA theory is highly feasible andapplicable in interpreting the dynamic film discourse. On the one hand, the studybroadens the research area of MDA. On the other hand, the present research enrichesthe study dimension of micro films, and at the same time, it enables the audience toappreciate the visual dynamic art works from a brand new perspective different fromthe traditional ones. It is hoped that the present study could be of some help toimprove the audience’s filmic appreciation ability to some extent. This research is, tosome degree, of academic significance in helping understand multimodal discourseand facilitating the further study and development of multimodal discourse.