| Photo news, as its name says, is an innovative form of report integrating photos and wordsto transmit information and to impose influence on viewers. In the digital information era, it hassubverted the traditional text-oriented mode of news report and become increasingly striking inmulticultural communication. In particular, the online photo news, in virtue of the priority ofInternet resources and technologies, has freshly developed into a timelier and more convenientchannel for Chinese to acquaint with the dynamic of the whole world.Another achievement is multimodal discourse analysis (MDA), which means at least twomodalities, such as photo, sound, word, etc., interact together to construct the discourse meaning.Since emerging in the1990s, the theory has achieved unprecedented progress in studying staticphotos based on Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar and social semiotics, like Kress&VanLeeuwen’s visual grammar and Royce’s framework of inter-semiotic complementarity.Nowadays, news discourse, as a multimodal discourse, has been paid favorable attention bylinguistic researchers. Whereas more researches signally focus on language itself or newsstructure and highlight the verbal modality, nearly neglecting the function of photos in makingmeaning.In terms of what has been mentioned above, this thesis takes online English photo news asresearch object and employs35samples on war and disasters from the international website"World Press Photo" from the year2010to2014. It aims to explore how the meaning isconstructed respectively through words and photos in online English photo news and how acoherent meaning is co-constructed through these two modalities from the perspective ofmultimodal discourse analysis. According to the quantitative and qualitative analysis, it turns outthat online English photo news can make meanings through English words by means oftransitivity for narrating the reality, mood system for influencing readers and thematic structurefor organizing a text. Similarly, photos are equivalent to represent what happened by means of narrative and conceptual processes, interact with viewers by contact, social distance, attitude andmodality, and to compose a complete discourse by information value, salience and framing. Inaddition, neither of photos and words is thoroughly independent in the process; instead, theydepend on each other, with the dominance of photos and words’ complement, to accomplish theoverall significance of online English photo news discourse through suggestive means likelexical items, reinforcement of address, information value on webpage, etc.To some extent, the study confirms further that multimodal discourse analysis is ofapplicability and feasibility in interpreting online English photo news, which would broaden theresearch field of MDA and enrich approaches to the study of photo news. Moreover, it deliversimportant implications to Chinese readers for comprehending online English photo newsaccurately and mastering its meanings critically under intercultural circumstances. Last but notleast, it recommends favorable methods to Chinese journalists of reporting news more efficientlyand influencing viewers more forcefully, and Chinese photographers of taking professionalphotos more proficiently. |
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