Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Movie The Little Prince

With the rapid development of modern information technology,people’s way of communication has changed dramatically.The mono-modal text is no longer the only way of communication;the transmission and expression of information have become a process with various models involved,such as graphics,voice,and video and so on.Under this circumstance,the traditional discourse analysis cannot meet the demands of the new age any more,hence,a new perspective for discourse analysis has emerged,that is,multimodal discourse analysis.Despite the flouring fruits of multimodal discourse analysis,more studies on multimodal discourse theory and its application remain to be done.Film discourse,as a typical of multimodal discourse,integrates text,image,sound,music and many other multimodal resources.And one of the research objects of multimodal discourse analysis is to explore how these different semiotic resources work with each other to convey meaning.While,previous studies of film discourse mainly concentrate on the visual images under the guidance of vis ual grammar,verbal text and sound haven’t paid sufficient attention;and studies from three dimensions are relatively rare.In order to comprehensively understand multimodal analysis,the present study,under the guidance of systemic functional grammar,visual grammar and audio grammar,adopts quantitative and qualitative research approach to study how these three modalities work together to construct meaning and make the film The Little Prince vivid.It takes shot as basic unit for analysis and adopts random sampling method to choose 25 shots to explore the dynamic discourse from the following aspects: Firstly,the verbal text is analyzed based on systemic functional grammar;next,meaning expressed by images of the film is studied;then,the human voice,background music and natural sound are also explored;finally,the relationship between these three modalities is investigated.The major findings are as follows: there are apparent differences in terms of using proportion and modal distribution in The Little Prince.And different modes mainly achieve certain prominent function.The involved models are complementary to each other for the absence of any modal will lead to the failure of meaning construction.Besides,even though the involved modalities are inseparable to each other in the same shot,they play different roles in the meaning construction.From the analysis,it can be concluded that the image modality plays the main role in the film The Little Prince,and other modals play the secondary role which can supplement or strengthen the main modal.The significance of the research lies in its practical and theoretical values.Withthe respect to theoretical value,it widens the field of multimodal discourse analysis,and it is also an attempt to verify the feasibility and operability of combining the verbal,visual and audio modality together to explore the overall meaning of the film The Little Prince.As for its practical significance,compared with the traditional analysis on the film restricted to the literary comment,the multimodal discourse analysis with semiotic approach provides a new perspective to understand and appreciate the film.