Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Film Life Of Pi From The Prospective Of Visual Grammar

In the process of scientific development and technical upgraduation, the communicative means of people have become more and more diversified. The information has not been expressed only by the single text. Nowadays, people communicate with each other to express meanings and exchange information in their daily life through the use of many symbols, such as text, image, color, motion, sound and so forth. Therefore, the traditional researches, which only focus on language, can not analyze discourse thoroughly and deeply. At the same time, people have started to recognize the importance and practicability of multimodal discourse. Consequently, the multimodal discourse analysis has emerged and is gradually becoming a hot topic in linguistics in recent years. In this field, Kress and Van Leeuwen are the prominent researchers. On the basis of Halliday’s systemic functional grammar, they proposed a framework of visual grammar in their work Reading Image, which is regarded as the theoretical base for the subsequent multimodal discourse analyses. Film, as the media people like, for integrating a variety of modals, not only makes people’s life more interesting but also provides a relaxed way for the emotional communications and cultural exchanges of public. Filmic discourses contain many modalities, such like language, image, and music and so on, which makes films become the important corpus of multimodal discourse analysis. Life of Pi is a classic film which enjoys great popularity. Hence, people are keen on discussing the reasons for the success of the film. It is worth researching how the discourse meaning in the film is constructed by the multimodalities. Therefore, this film is selected as the material for the study.Based on visual grammar by Kress and Van Leeuwen, the study makes a multimodal analysis on the film Life of Pi through both quantitative and qualitative researches. The study selects a large number of images from the film and conducts a detailed analysis of the representative meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning of them to explore how the features of filmic discourse are expressed by multi-modalities. Through those detailed analyses, the study achieves the expected goal and the conclusions can be drawn as follows. Firstly, it is entirely feasible and operational to analyze filmic discourse from the perspective of visual grammar. The filmic images can be illustrated and appreciated by representative meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning. Secondly, filmic discourse is the synthesis of many modalities, including visual modality and auditory modality. The relations between them are divided into complementary relation and non-complementary relation. Different modalities integrate with each other and work together to construct the whole meaning. Furthermore, in order to express the meaning and spirit of films better, it is essential to make selections and complements among different modalities.This study appreciates Life of Pi from the perspective of linguistics in order to further enrich the practical researches on multimodal discourse analysis and strengthen people’s recognition about multimodal discourse. Meanwhile, it aims to provide a new view for audiences to enjoy films and brings enlightenments and creative ideas for the film makers.