A Study Of Humor In Zootopia From The Perspective Of Multimodality

As a distinctive characteristic of humanity,humor has rich content and a wide range of application.The study of humor can be dated back to the times of Aristotle in Ancient Greece.Scholars have studied humor from perspectives of psychology,rhetoric,philosophy,etc.It's not until1970 s did linguists start to study humor in the field of linguistics,but most of the subjects they have made research on are verbal humorj.In today's digital era of science and technology,an increasing number of humor is realized by means of non-verbal humor,which is particularly prominent in movies.However,there have been just a handful of scholars studying humor in movies systematically by applying linguistic theories for a long time.From the perspective of multimodality and based on Zhang Delu's Synthetic Theoretical Framework of Multimodal Discourse Analysis(STF of MDA),the thesis investigates how humor in Disney's animated movie Zootopia is realized through the interactions of different modes.In STF of MDA,Zhang Delu puts forth that the theoretical framework is mainly composed of four levels: culture,context,content and expression,in which the cultural level is the key level,and the related cultural context is the basic context for multimodal discourses,without which any situational context is meaningless.The content level includessemantic level and form level.The semantic level refers to discourse meaning,which is embodied by different modes and their relations,and the linguistic media and the non-linguistic media are carriers of these modes and their relations.Zhang Delu argues that in specific contexts,each mode interact with each other in complementary and non-complementary relations to produce discourse meaning.STF of MDA has an immense power theoretically,yet few people have applied it to analyze the production of humor so far.Under the guidance of the theoretical frame,this thesis attempts to study the following two questions: 1.What modes mainly appear in Zootopia? 2.How do these modes interact and cooperate with each other to produce humorous effect?The results of the study are as follows:(1)There are visual mode and auditory mode in Zootopia,of which the visual mode includes elements like facial expression,subtitle,image,gesture and action,while the auditory mode mainly contains verbal language,accent,tone,velocity,various kinds of sound like the sound of vehicles and sound of crunching,background music,etc.All these modes with their interactions cause humor.(2)Humor in Zootopia is formed through the interactions between visual mode and auditory mode,under which the mono-mode and the mono-mode,the mono-mode and the multi-modes,and the multi-modesand multi-modes present complementary and non-complementary relations.The complementary relation is subdivided into reinforcement and non-reinforcement type and the non-complementary relation can be further divided into overlapping,inclusion and context-interaction.Most humor is effected by the above different interactions among different modes.The significance of the study lies in two aspects.Theoretically,the analysis of humor in the movie from the perspective of multimodality is a supplement of humor study,which probes into the mechanism of how verbal humor and non-verbal humor interact with each other to realize humorous effect.Practically,through the study of humor from the multimodal perspective,people can know more about the nature of humor and it provides some clues for the film producers as to how to make the movie more interesting.