A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Interpersonal Meaning And Interactive Meaning In TED About Language Speeches

The development of information technology brings human communication into the multimedia era where communication can be achieved by a variety of modes,such as oral modality,auditory modality,tactile modality and so on.This kind of multimodal communication is multimodal discourse.At present,the study of multimodal discourse is still in the initial development stage.Most researchers focus on the study of multimodal text,while they give less attention to the study of dynamic multimodal discourse.TED speech video is a typical dynamic multimodal discourse with great communicative meaning.Therefore,the purpose of this study is to explore how the interpersonal and interactive meaning are constructed and what is the relationship between different modalities in TED speech videos.The 12 speeches about language uploading on official site of TED in 2016 are chosen as the research data.Based on the interpersonal function of systemic functional grammar and interactive function of visual grammar,this study adopts both quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the research data.First,analytical softwares—AntConc 3.4.4 version and MMA Video are utilized to analyze the 12 speeches in this study.After marking and calculating the detailed aspects of all the 12 speeches through the analytical tools,this study analyzes the interpersonal meaning from mood system,modality system and personal system;the interactive meaning from contact,social distance,perspective and modality.Finally,discussions about the relationship between different modalities are presented.Through the analysis of all the 12 speeches,some findings can be concluded as follows.Firstly,in term of interpersonal meaning construction,declarative mood is the most frequently used to express statements,emotions and suggestions;interrogative mood is used to call the audiences' attention and to control rhythms of speeches and imperative mood is used to call for action.With regard to the modality system,the proportion of modal value is different in all the 12 speeches and the low modal value is the most frequently used.As for the personal system,the extensive use of the first person pronoun and the second person pronoun closes the distance between speakers and audiences.Secondly,with regard to the interactive meaning,the frequency of demand act is lower than offer act in contact;the social distances in all the 12 speeches are constantly changing;TED speeches are provided through different perspectives and producers use high modality to express speech contents and information.Thirdly,through investigating the relations between the different modalities in TED speeches,it can be found that the auditory modality which formed by language is the main modality.Visual modality plays a supporting role in TED speeches.The relations between visual modality and auditory can be divided in to three kinds: reinforcement,extension and interpretation.Visual modality and auditory modality work together to construct meaning in TED speeches.Therefore,this study is hoped to provide a new perspective to the researchers of public speeches and to help the readers to have a better understanding of TED speeches.