| Multimodal discourse refers to a kind of social practice which contains two or more multiple semiotic resources for realizing meaning, such as, images, language, color, gesture, music, etc. With the rapid development and extensive use of multimedia technology, multimodal discourse floods in people’s daily lives. As a kind of multimodal discourse, movie posters which are composed by images, language and other semiotic resources are not only print advertisements of movies, but also creative and aesthetic products of culture. They are affected by social environment, in different countries with different national characteristics, reflecting different national cultures.According to three metafunctions of Systemic-Functional Grammar, namely ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function, Visual Grammar analyzes multimodal discourses from three corresponding aspects, namely representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning. The thesis conducts multimodal discourse analysis of eight posters of four war movies which are all well-made and far-reachingly influential employing Kress and Van Leeuween’s (1996) Visual Grammar as theoretical framework, which is conducive to study cooperation of different modals in meaning making and provide a new perspective for studying movie posters in the meantime.To begin with, the thesis briefly introduces the research background, pointing out the purpose and significance of the research. Secondly, the thesis reviews definitions of multimodality and multimodal discourse analysis, recounts the development history and research status of multimodal discourse analysis and movie posters, and elaborates Visual Grammar as theoretical framework. Thirdly, under Visual Grammar’s direction, eight war movie posters are analyzed from representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning of Visual Grammar. Lastly, from culture perspective, the thesis compares differences between China and western countries on constructing meaning of war movie posters.Through the case studies of war movie posters, the thesis proves that Visual Grammar is strongly applicable to analysis of movie posters, which offers a new perspective to analyze movie posters, helps audiences to perceive movie posters’ meaning, and enhances appreciation of movie posters. What’s more, it is found that how the three meanings of movie posters are realized. The representational meaning is realized by narrative representation which shows developing action and event, changing process and twinkling space arrangement, or conceptual representation which shows persistent state or more general truth; the interactive meaning is realized by the relationship between posters and audiences built by contact, social distance and perspective. The compositional meaning is realized by structure, layout and attraction of movie posters. Finally, it is also found that differences of values orientations between China and western countries, such as war views, religions and so on, impact meaning making of movie posters. |
