A Dynamic Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Movie Red Sorghum

With the development of Internet and mass media, language is not the only way of communication, a part of which consists of non-linguistic factors. In the aspect of discourse analysis, the discourse analysis of written language and spoken language can not meet the need of modern discourse analysis, so multimodal discourse analysis appears. Scholars who make multimodal discourse analysis on movie mostly take Visual Grammar of Kress and van Leeuwen as theoretical framework. And most of the scholars study discourse from the static aspect. This dissertation focuses on the dynamic multimodal discourse analysis of the movie Red Sorghum based on Zhang Delu’s synthetic theoretical framework.The research methodologies employed in this dissertation are descriptive analysis and qualitative analysis. Five representative filmic clips are selected to be analyzed. The descriptive analysis is the description of the genre of the clips. Qualitative analysis is based on Zhang Delu’s synthetic theoretical framework. Firstly, the form and grammar of each clip are studied. And this dissertation researches how the grammars realize the discourse meaning. Secondly, the relations of forms are researched which contain complementary relation and non-complementary relation. Lastly, the expression level of each clip is studied.According to the analysis, there are mainly visual modality and auditory modality. The auditory modality contains background music and background song. The relation of visual modality and auditory modality is complementary relation which means that both of them play an important part in constructing the meaning of filmic discourse. Lastly, on the expression level, both linguistic and non-linguistic media occur in these five clips.Through the dynamic multimodal discourse analysis of the movie Red Sorghum, this dissertation testifies the applicability and practicability of Zhang Delu’s synthetic theoretical framework in analyzing filmic discourse. It also suggests a new perspective in analyzing filmic discourse. At the same time, it helps to broaden the research field on filmic discourse analysis.