The Meaning Construction Of Memes In Multimodal Discourse Analysis

Weibo, a popular social media in China, has been regarded as a carrier to achieve various functions, such as phatic function, information function. This thesis takes a very famous Weibo “Wo Men” released by a popular actor Li Chen announcing his love relationship with an actress Fan Bingbing, and some extended corporation advertisements imitating the “Wo Men” to propagandize products as examples to discuss meaning construction and production of multimodal text.The cooperation of words, images and some other modalities of the original multimodal text and those extended advertisements leaves the room for conducting multimodal text analysis, gaining further development in recent years, among which the analysis from visual grammar proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen and multimodal metaphor, a new development of conceptual metaphor, are especially in focus. The thesis also conduct multimodal text analysis from the two angles, to illustrate, on the one hand, practically how those companies hit the mark on the basis of Weibo, on the other hand, theoretically that visual grammar is more than an automatic manipulation of grammar rules, and multimodal metaphor, not just a device to strengthen effects of words, sentences or text. What’s more, previous analysis based on visual grammar and multimodal metaphor has always been conducted mechanically, implying that these two theories are adopted just accidentally, but this thesis reveals inter-relation of the two theories under the domain of multimodal discourse analysis. For example, there is a natural relationship between the representational meaning and the source and target domain of multimodal metaphor.As for the production of multimodal texts, the research does not regard those extended advertisements as natural ones, but in an imitation process reflected by memes, a form of information in Blackmore’s view. This thesis extends some language-related concepts of memes to that of image. For example, the spreading ways of language memes are introduced to the image memes, and general frame for the spreading ways of multimodal texts are put forward based on spreading ways,which explains the particular and dynamic conduction ways of Weibo.