| With the continuous development of modern science and technology, various types of discourses present to be multimodal. Multimodal discourse involves two or more than two kinds of semiotic symbols(such as verbal text, images, gestures, color, graphics, typography and so on) to construct meaning. Advertising, magazine, and newspaper are typical multimodal discourse. Traditional discourse analysis only pays attention to linguistic features.It means that the role of other symbols is neglected. Therefore, this thesis will analyze discourse from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis. This study focuses on environmental news, a timely report on the environment. They are reports on natural environment pollution and protection, ecological environment and so on, which help readers to realize the change of the environment and take possible measures to protect the environment.Halliday(1978) proposes that language, as one of the social semiotics, has three metafunctions, which respectively are ideational, interpersonal, and textual function. Based on these, Kress & Van Leeuwen(1996, 2006) extend language’s three metafunctions to visual mode, and put forward visual grammar, whose core are representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning for the analysis of visual images. They point out that images are the source of meaning and have multiple functions like language. Zhang Delu(2009) also puts forward theoretical framework of multimodal discourse analysis. Based on these three theories, this paper proposes a model for the present research to analyze the interactive meaning of environmental news. These selected 30 discourses of this paper are derived from some international authoritative websites, such as www. earthtimes. org. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods are used to study this corpus.The analysis shows that: firstly, in the environmental news, language’s function is to provide objective facts to the public. At the same time, it makes people realize the urgency of environment protection and calls on them to take potential action to protect environment in a certain extent. In order to enhance persuasiveness and objectivity, producers always make use of declarative, median and low modality, and the third person pronouns. The usage of declarative reflects that the environmental news’ speech role is to offer relevant environmentalinformation to the viewers. The use of median and low modality and the third person pronouns indicates that producers try their best to show the facts objectively and impersonally,enhancing the credibility of news. Moreover, producers also use expressions with implicit subjective orientation to call on people’s attention to environmental problems and action.Secondly, the function of images in environmental news is to provide objective information and attract viewers’ attention. Based on this, producers tend to present offering images. At the same time, producers more often make use of social distance, eye to eye angle and frontal angle, and high modality to enhance objectivity and persuasiveness of environmental news.Social distance are used more than public and personal distance, as social distance make represented participants and viewers in an relatively intimate condition so that viewers are more likely to pay attention to environmental problems. Frequent use of frontal angle and eye to eye angle suggests that viewers and represented participants are equal, and it also makes viewers involve into the image world, which indicates that the events presented in the image are happening around us. It is more persuasive. Images with high modality are frequently used to ensure objectivity and authenticity of the image information. Thirdly, the relationship between verbiage and image in the environmental news mostly is inclusion. It means that language’s function plays a major role in environmental news. It provides overall objective information. Image strengthens language’s function and shows some detailed information.Based on the study of environmental news, this thesis has the above findings. These research results can also be applicable to other types of news such as political news, economic news and so on. |
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