The Semantic Analysis Of Visual Modes In Visual Poetic Texts Under The Paradigm Of Visual Grammar

Kress and Van Leeuwen have extended Halliday’s approach that language is a kind of social sign which possesses meaning potential to other social signs, which breaks the mindset that language holds a dominant position in the traditional communication. They argues that all the semiotic resources that include image, sound, color, typography and so forth possess the same status with the linguistic sign in the meaning construction of the social communication and the social practice. Kress and Van Leeuwen have extended the three metafunctions from language to image, music, color, typography and some other signs on the basis of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar. Kress and Van Leeuwen consider that these semiotic resources are not only independent but also interactive. They argue that we should analyze the linguistic features, meanwhile, emphasize the functions of image, color, and typography these visual semiotic resources in the discourse. The mode in this thesis refers to the form of semiotic resource, for example, the visual mode refers to image, color, or typography these visual semiotic resources’ forms. All these visual semiotic resources possess different meaning potentials, so we study the forms of these visual semiotic resources in order to get the content they convey.The thesis, with the visual mode of multimodal texts as the analytical center and the visual grammar as the theoretical framework, whose theoretical foundation is Michael Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, decomposes the visual modes in the poetic texts, including the color mode, the image mode, the typography mode and the composition mode, and analyzes the meanings of these visual modes, meanwhile, tries to get the social meaning and the cultural meaning.The thesis analyzes different visual modes in visual poetic texts under the paradigm of visual grammar and gets the conclusion that the image mode and the color mode in the visual poetic texts create the interactive meaning. The typography mode brings the representational meaning. Meanwhile, the composition mode produces the compositional meaning. This thesis distinguishes the meanings of visual modes in the visual poetic texts, which offers readers a new perspective for appreciating the poetic texts. Meanwhile, it demonstrates that visual semiotic resource in the visual poetic text can convey social meaning and cultural meaning as well as language in a practical way.