| With the rapid development of socioeconomic and Internet technology,traditional discourse analysis has also gone through a series of changes. At one time,discourse analysis treats language as the dominant semiotic system, and is mainly concerned with language system and its relation with cognition. This has made our research insufficient as other forms of meaning making has been neglected. Therefore Multimodal Discourse Analysis(MDA) comes out in the west in 1990 s to solve this problem. MDA is a new trend of discourse analysis since it looks beyond language and pay more attention to other semiotics like sounds, images, colors, gestures, etc.The Systematic-functional grammar provides a solid theoretical foundation to the multimodal discourse analysis. Kress and Van Leeuwen are the most distinct scholars in the field of MDA, they derived a basic frame work for visual grammar from the three meta-functions in SNG. After many years of development, MDA has been widely used in various areas like teaching, literature, video works, etc. However, most of the studies are focused on static images while dynamic discourses are neglected.Thus this thesis chooses the movie trailer Life of Pi as the research object, aiming to discover how the visual and acoustic modalities make meaning and their relations in it.Trailer is a kind of advertisement or a commercial for the purpose of promoting films. In order to attract the audients and grasp their eyes, it usually selects the most wonderful and splendid parts from the film to combine a short movie of 2-3 minutes long. Life of Pi is an Oscar-winning movie directed by the American-Chinese film director Ang Lee. It has won four prizes including the Best Director and Best Visual Effects in 85 thAcademy Awards. Therefore an multimodal discourse analysis on the movie trailer of this film is a feasible and valuable work.The research reaches the expected goal. With Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar as theoretical foundation, this thesis has found how is the visual mode expressed meaning through representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning in the movie trailer. Conceptual process is less typical than narrative ones in dynamic discourse since any scene without a vector could be seen as conceptual process. Through the vectors in images we could get the main event that avisual product wants to illustrate. Compared with narrative process, conceptual process usually provides a more persistent and stable state. The interactive meaning is similar to the interpersonal meaning in Halliday’s systemic functional grammar. An image could be either demand or offer depending on the represented participant depicted in an image. Compositional meaning operates in the layout of an image to produce meaning and create textual coherence. The placement of elements in an image could influence the value of message that it wants tell. By adapting Van Leeuwen’s audio grammar, this thesis has found that audio modality is mainly conveyed through three aspects: sound perspective, melody, voice quality. As for perspective, it could be illuminated that when sounds present or represent actions simultaneously, the semiotic resource of loudness could distinguish the importance of different sounds. The melody patterns is the core part of melody system for it could embody subtle emotion that the dynamic discourse wants to convey. Sound qualities could also convey various meaning. Generally speaking, the louder, higher, tenser the voice is, the more conflicts is involve, while relaxed voice in low volume is usually used to express informal distance. |
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