| Apart from verbiage, non-verbal elements such as pictures, gestures and sounds also contribute a lot in the meaning-making process of the entire discourse. Therefore, Monomodal Discourse Analysis, with its focus on one semiotic resource, can hardly meet the needs of a comprehensive discourse analysis and thus is gradually dethroned by Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Multimodal discourse refers to a linguistic unit where two or more semiotic modes cooperating with each other to make meaning as a whole. The analysis of multimodal discourse originated around the 1990 s and enjoyed a rapid development ever since then.Quite a number of scholars have attempted to explore the most suitable theoretical framework for the analysis of multimodal discourse. Most of them have their theoretical basis rooted within the Systemic Functional Linguistic paradigm. Among them, one of the most outstanding theories was put forward by Kress and van Leeuwen in 2006, known as Visual Grammar. It analyzes the internal structure of images, which pioneers the way for the research of visual mode. Based on Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar as well as Halliday and Matthiessen’s Systemic Functional Grammar, this thesis conducts a multimodal analysis of news discourse, a particular genre that generally consists of texts and images, from the following three dimensions: ideational/representational, interpersonal/interactional and textual/compositional. In addition, building on the two theories, the researcher also aims to conduct a systematic analysis of text-image relations and try to illustrate their synergetic influence on news reporting.The data for analysis in this thesis are economic news reports. The motivation for selecting this type of news discourse is twofold: my personal enthusiasm for economics and more importantly less attention paid by scholars working in the areas of both linguistics and journalism. A certain amount of news data are collected and then explored with a primary focus on the text-image relations within from two perspectives: how images relate to the headlines and captions, and how images relate to the text bodies. As a result, the leader-follower relationship and symmetric-asymmetric relationship are proposed and elaborated in this thesis.Based upon the analysis, this research intends to bring both theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, addressing multimodal analysis theories through an analysis of authentic evidence of news stories can not only verify the current multimodal analysis theories, but also help modify some problematic application of these theories. So this research contributes to the vertical development of multimodal analysis theories. Practically, the present study enacts how useful images are to demonstrate the news values and to deepen the understanding and appreciation of news discourse. It is apparent that substantial improvement can be made on economic news reporting. |
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