A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of A Bite Of China Ⅱ

In recent decades, with the rapid development of information technology and multimedia technology, the release and acquisition of information through single-modal discourse can no longer satisfy people’s needs as they gradually enter a multimodal communication era. The traditional discourse analysis, however, focuses only on the analysis of the language, and less attention is paid to other modalities, such as pictures, colors, sounds and actions. To cope with such a situation, the multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) came into being. MDA theory mainly takes Halliday’s (1994) systemic functional linguistic (SFL) as the theoretical basis, and extends the defined three meta-functions to the other semiotic resources in addition to language. Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) first put forward the systemic and comprehensive image analysis framework:visual grammar (VG) in their masterpiece Reading Image:The Grammar of Visial Design, which provides a concrete theoretical basis for MDA. Martin (1992) put forward a five level system as a synthetic analytical framework which involves verbal and nonverbal, in combination with culture, context, content and forms. The above theories constitute the theoretical framework of this thesis.This thesis uses A Bite of China Ⅱas its research object and tries to analyze the meaning construction process and the relations between modalities. The analysis is conducted mainly from two aspects:the visual grammar analysis and the synthetic analysis on the culture, context and form levels. In terms of visual grammar, Kress and van Leeuwen’s theory is employed to analyze the realizations of the three meta-function meanings: representational meaning, interactive meaning, and compositional meaning, in A Bite of China Ⅱand the complement and contrast between modalities, whose effectiveness is demonstrated through the examples of some scenes (pictures). In terms of culture, Martin’s (1992) theory is mostly used to explore the meaning behind the images and in A Bite of China Ⅱ, and the cultural elements underneath the variety of food ingredients and diverse cooking processes.This research is a new attempt of applying the three meta-functions analysis to documentaries, this research reveals that first, the modalities in visual grammar can be found in each shot, but its meaning construction process is constantly changing, and certain meaning construction process or certain combination of meaning construction processes would make it easier for viewers to understand than otherwise, which accounts for the higher frequency of their employment; there are mutual interaction and complementary relationships between modalities. Second, the complement between modals and the fusion of cultural elements results in the more smooth and natural expression of meaning as well. This research expands the research field of MDA to a certain extent, improves people’s ability to read and appreciate multimodal discourses, and hopefully helps to inspire video producers to pay more attention to the modalities interactions while making cultural promotion videos, so as to make them more acceptable for the viewers with different cultural backgrounds to understand.