The Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Ugly Betty

Within the era of high-speed development,the science and technology is progressing and innovating rapidly.At the same time,the ways people access information are undergoing a great change from the single text message to various channels in getting information including pictures,coloration,videos,audios,actions and so on.At the same time,the traditional discourse analysis which only regards text as the research object has developed into multimodal discourse analysis step by step in which texts are combined with images,actions,gestures,colors,music and so on.According to Halliday's three meta-functions of systemic-functional grammar,Kress and Van Leeuwen expanded Halliday's theory and then constructed the first systematic and comprehensive theoretical framework of visual grammar to analyze the image centered on the meaning of representation,interaction and composition.This theoretical framework also becomes a solid theoretical basis for the analysis of multimodal discourse.Film and television works are typical kinds of multimodal discourses which convey information and common sense by color,text,images,sound,and other symbol resources.And image is the basic unit of film and television language elements.Several research methods were applied together to analyze the text and image information of 92 shots about the protagonist Betty in TV series Ugly Betty(Season ?).In these ways,firstly,the researchers can analyze TV play images from different aspects,such as representational meaning,compositional meaning,and interactive meaning.In Ugly Betty(Season ?),the representational meaning is mainly realized by narrative process,in which action and reaction process are more common than verbal and mental process.The interactive meaning is achieved through offering act,impersonal social distance,horizontal perspectives and high modality.The compositional meaning reflects in rich expression means of framing.Secondly,the relationship between the main mode of image and text reflected the complementary relationship.The complementary relationship between them can make the TV plays' meaning better shown in front of the audience.The research can theoretically widen the range of the multimodality analysis to a certain degree and testify the feasibility and possibility of Visual Grammar applied to the analysis of TV plays.In real life,the thesis will provide a new perspective for people in appreciating this TV series.At the same time,with this different angle,people are able to comprehend the multimodality of TV series more deeply and overall.