A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of English Affectional Movie Posters

With the development and improvement of computer science and multimedia technology, we have come into an information age, in which various kinds of semiotic resources such as color, image, and music begin to play a more and more important role in human activities. More and more people, especially researchers realize that it has been far from enough to analyze meaning construal of text just from the perspective of language. Multimodal discourse analysis has been a hot topic for scholars since 1990 s. Among these scholars, Kress and Leeuwen act as pioneers in this field, who propose Visual Grammar on the basis of Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar, providing a theoretical basis for multimodal discourse analysis.Movie posters, with the purpose of delivering movie information, attracting audience and publicizing movies, serve as advertisements for movies and thus are called “business cards” of movies. By reviewing several previous studies on movie posters, it can be easily found that movie posters were always analyzed from the perspective of aesthetic value or their function, but are seldom studied from the perspective of linguistics. In fact, as a kind of multimodal discourse, a movie poster is composed of image, color and other non-verbal semiotic resources besides language. To read a movie poster is actually to decode a multimodal discourse which includes color, image and other semiotic resources. Therefore, movie posters can also be studied from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis based on Visual Grammar. Of all the types of movies, affectional movies are the most popular ones, for this kind of movie expresses people's strong emotions towards or desire for love. Thus, in this thesis, 30 English affectional movie posters were chosen carefully as samples and analyzed with the method of qualitative analysis. This thesis begins by displaying and reviewing some previous studies of multimodal discourse analysis as well as movie posters at home and abroad. Then, the author tried to analyze the 30 chosen English movie posters in detail from the perspective of representational meaning, interactive meaning, and compositional meaning under the guidance of Visual Grammar. The purpose is to elaborate clearly on how the three meanings work together to construct the whole meaning of English affectional movie posters.By analyzing the chosen 30 English affectional movie posters chosen, this thesis has testified the strong applicability and practicality of Visual Grammar in interpreting English affectional movie posters, and has also expanded the scope of multimodal discourse analysis and the studies of movie posters. Moreover, this thesis is hoped to exert a positive influence on enhancing the audiences' multi-literacy of the multimodal discourse in analyzing English affectional movie posters and cultivating their awareness of the beauty of English affectional movie posters. Besides, this thesis can also be beneficial to English affectional movie poster designers, for it can help them make good use of the modalities and arrangement of visual elements to accomplish the best visual design.This thesis has some limitations. The affectional movie poster is a special kind of poster, and the thesis only testifies the applicability of Visual Grammar in the appreciation and explanation of this kind of discourse. Whether other kinds of movie posters can also be interpreted from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis needs to be testified in the future.