The Construction Of Female Image-Multimodal Positive Discourse Analysis Of The Film The Color Purple

The Color Purple,a novel written by American writer Alice Walker has won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1983.It was later adapted by Steven Spielberg into a film with the same name,which has won 11 Oscar nominations in 1986.The popularity of the film has gradually attracted the attention of the academic circles.However,most of the previous studies are confined to the subtitle translation of the film,themes or artistic technique analysis of the film and the comparative study between the film and novel.There is no research of the film from the linguistic approach.The Color Purple is about the black females who unite and fight for liberty,independence,equality under the racial and gender oppression.Through a large number of verbal and visual resources,the film successfully creates a black female image who fights for equal social status under the oppression of race and gender.Therefore,it is a typical discourse for multimodal positive analysis.On the basis of the modified theoretical framework for multimodal positive discourse analysis proposed by LvWei(2011),the current analysis intends to combine the appraisal resources of the language and image to explore how these different modalities construe the change of the heroine's social status in The Color Purple.Five scenes are selected from the film within the first two selected as background information to show the status of Celie before she is inspired.The last three are about the awakening and resistance of Celie after Shug's inspiration,they also include Celie's happy reunion with her family.Through the analysis,the major findings are as follows: firstly,the change of female's social status in the film not only can be realized through language,but also evoked through image,but their forms of realization differentiate from each other.The change of female's attitude in verbal is mainly realized through lexical choice,varying from explicit way to implicit way,by attitude,graduation and engagement resources.While in image the change of female's attitude is mainly achieved by the attribute or process elements in representation and strengthened by the shooting distance or angle in interaction.And the composition of the image does not contribute much to evoke attitude.Secondly,the intersemiotic complementarity between visual and verbal is mainly realized through repetition,synonym orantonym in terms of ideational meaning and reinforcement of address,attitudnal congruence or dissonance in terms of interpersonal meaning.Moreover,although visual semiotic and verbal semiotic co-occur in the image,they are independent from each other in layout.Therefore these two modalities do not complement each other in terms of compositional meaning in films.The current study tests the applicability of combining of Visual Grammar and Appraisal Theory as a tool for multimodal positive discourse analysis research of the filmic discourse,it provides us with a new angle for positive discourse analysis.Moreover,it brings about some helpful hints for the audiences as well as the film makers.