| With the fast development of multimedia, such semiotics as image, color and sound have played a more and more important role in communication. Therefore, the traditional discourse analysis that focuses on language in use itself is not enough to analyze the multimodal discourses. Since 1990s, a number of linguists have conducted researches into multimodal discourses from the point of view of social semiotics. Kress and van Leeuwen are ones of them, who set up a grammar to analyze the images on the basis of Halliday's systemic functional grammar in their book Reading Images. The visual grammar consists of representational, interactive and compositional meanings,which offers a theoretical basis for later multimodal researches and facilitates the fast development of multimodal discourse analysis.Most multimodal analysis center on static discourses, such as, print ads or movie posters. The number of multimodal analysis on dynamic discourses is still limited. In recent years, with the development of the technology of the Internet, online commercials have been more and more common in our life. In the present study, the data are a series of videos made by SK-II in their movement #change destiny#. Two sample videos are selected from them to conduct the multimodal discourse analysis.The first sample is the video of Tang Wei, spokesperson of the brand. She explains the concept of changing destiny in the video with her own experiences. The second one is about four Chinese girls' experience of making life better by getting rid of the trouble brought by the issue of the leftover women. The study intends to comprehensively interpret the two videos from the multimodal point of view and mainly researches into how the three meanings of visual grammar are realized in the two sample videos and also the synergy of the visual and auditory modalities to construct the meaning of the videos. Therefore, the study makes a detailed analysis of the two sample videos on the basis of visual grammar by Kress and van Leeuwen and the inter-modal relationship by Zhang Delu.Transcription of the videos is necessary in order to carry out a multimodal analysis on dynamic discourses. In this thesis, the two videos are transcribed into pictures on the visual level on the basis of Baldry and Thibault and Zhang Delu's theories. That is,for each second, one screenshot that is related to the meaning of the videos is selected to make the multimodal analysis.Through the detailed analysis of the two sample videos, it is found that first,regarding the representational meaning in the videos, the narrative process is more common than the conceptual process. The reactional process formed by the vectors of the eye line of the represented participants is the most common, which reveals the relations between them. Second, about the interactive meaning in the videos, they mainly adopt the offer act, the close or medium shot, the frontal angle. The offer act objectively presents the development of the stories to the viewers. The close or medium shot indicates personal social distance between the viewers and represented participants. The frontal angle suggests a sense of involvement in the represented world. The close shot and the frontal angle make the viewers feel like part of the represented world and conveys the theme of the videos to the viewers. In the first sample, the modality is not high because of its black background and the second one has a high modality. Third, as for the compositional meaning, the information value of the two videos shows a given-new pattern. The represented participants are made salient through the close shot and frontal angle. The brand name SK-? and the movement #change destiny# are made salient through the contrast of red background and white words in the center. Last, the visual and auditory modalities complement with each other to highlight the theme of the videos. |
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