A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Homepages Of The Official Websites Of Chinese Foreign Ministry And U.S. State Department

In the current information society,multimodal discourse accounts for a larger part in daily reading materials than before.How to interpret the relationship between multimodalities of a media and how to improve multimodal discourse literacy has become a noticeable issue that deserves more researches.As a main platform for communication,website undoubtedly has become an economic media to deliver and get information.In the academic circle at home and abroad,the research on multimodal webpage has drawn increasing attention in recent years.Multimodal discourse analysis of webpage is a newly emerged academic research field in China.For now there appeared the multimodal discourse analysis of personal webpage,culture publicity webpage,microblog,shopping website,bank website,museum website,news website,and enterprise website,etc.Most of the previous studies take appraisal theory,Visual Grammar,image-text relation theory,and genre theory as the theoretical foundation.However the comparative multimodal discourse analysis of the official websites of national diplomatic institutes has not been conducted.Therefore this thesis attempts to further expand the research scope of multimodality application.China and the USA are two leading powers in the world,and are typical representatives of developing countries and developed countries respectively.Serving as an open window for foreign propaganda,the official website of Ministry of Foreign Affairs of PRC and the official website of the State Department are channels for announcing diplomatic policy and diplomatic activities.As a typical multimodal discourse,the influence of the homepage of the national official website on national diplomacy propaganda and the building of national image is unmeasurable.Bateman established Genre and Multimodality Model(GeM model)which is an analytical framework for multimodal discourse analysis.Based on GeM model,the analysis of the homepage of national official website enriches the empirical studies of multimodal discourse.Under the guidance of GeM model,this thesis will conduct a multimodal discourse analysis of the homepages of the official website of Chinese Foreign Ministry and the official website of U.S.State Department.This thesis adopts both quantitative and qualitative research methods in analyzing the base layer,layout layer,rhetorical layer and navigational layer of the two homepages.Then the author figures out the differences and makes an explanation.The thesis discusses how these multiple modes are combined together in meaning construction and how the national image establishment is influenced in the meaning construction process.Furthermore as a complement to the analysis conducted under the guidance of GeM model,the social-cultural analysis is added to further expound the reasons behind the differences.The author hopes that this study may provide designers who work on the design of the national official websites with some insightful theoretical framework from the point of linguistics and eventually contribute to the optimization of website design and to the establishment of a better international image.