Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of China’s National Image Publicity Film

With the rapid development of science and technology in modern society, human’s communication can not be realized by using only one modality, but by many modalities simultaneously, such as image, music, sound, color and so on. The discourse accomplished in this communicative way is called “multimodal discourse”. Generally speaking, the study on multimodal discourse is still at its initial stage, especially in China. The majority of the researches on multimodal discourse analysis is done to study the static discourses by the method of qualitative analysis, basing on Halliday’s Functional Grammar and Kress & Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar. In this thesis, a multimodal discourse analysis of dynamic discourse China’s National Image Publicity Film is conducted on the basis of the five text-image relation Patterns proposed by Schriver. Both the methods of qualitative and quantitative analysis are adopted in this thesis to study the synergy between the modalities of language, speech sound and image in multimodal discourse China’s National Image Publicity Film. Firstly, the author analyzes the corpus China’s National Image Publicity from the most Marco perspective to study the synergy between the modalities of language, speech sound and image based on the quantitative method. In this part, the author mainly concentrates on the relation patterns between language and image in China’s National Image Publicity Film. Secondly, the corpus China’s National Image Publicity Film is divided into three parts on the basis of the concept “generic stage”, the method of case study is adopted to study how the modalities of language, speech sound and image cooperate and coordinate with one another to express information. Through the study of dynamic discourse China’s National Image Publicity Film, it is found that five language-image relation patterns are involved in this discourse, including redundant relation, complementary relation, supplementary relation, juxtapositional relation and stage-setting relation. Among these five language-image patterns, stage-setting relation, supplementary relation and complementary relation are the three main language-image relation patterns. For each relation pattern, all the modalities of language, speech sound and image cooperate and coordinate perfectly from different dimensions and levels to express information in multimodal discourse.