Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Meaning Construction Of Promo Videos In Beijing's Bid For The 2022 Winter Olympic Games

Multimodal discourse analysis has been applied to do the analysis of the meaning construction of various discourses.This study aims at analyzing how the visual mode and the verbal mode are organized to realize the representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning as well as the ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function and how the visual mode and the verbal mode are co-constructed to realize the whole meaning in the promo videos of Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games.The 178 visual images and 25 sentences are selected as research data from the four videos played in the presentation of the Chinese Olympic Committee at the 128 th IOC Session in Kuala Lumpur,Malaysia on July 31 st,2015.Halliday's systemic functional grammar,Kress and van Leeuwen's visual grammar and the Barthes' classification of the text-image relations facilitate the whole process of this study.Meanwhile,both quantitative method and qualitative method are adopted to calculate and analyze the distribution of meanings and metafuctions in these promo videos.The major findings of the present study can be concluded as follows:First,the action process,the circumstantial process and the speech and mental process take up the highest percentages of the narrative processes,which conforms to the theme of the Winter Olympic Games.As to the conceptual process,the symbolical process takes up half of the images,analytical process ranks the second and the fewest ones belong to classificational process,which demonstrates that there are many Chinese historical and cultural elements in these videos.In the interactive meaning,the “offer” images,the personal and social distance and objective attitude illustrate that these videos are offering true information to get a close relationship with viewers.In the last compositional meaning,the center-margin structure images are the most and then the left-right images and the top-down structure images are the fewest in the information value.As the salience is correlated with the framing,the main participant is usually put in the center,then on the right and at the top.In framing,connected structure images are more than disconnected structure ones,demonstrating that the majority of the elements in these images realize an entire meaning and a few separated elements realize different meanings.Second,the material process,the existential process and the behavioral process account for all the percentages in the ideational function,which conforms to the sports theme of these videos.As to the modality of the interpersonal function,the tenses of present and future occupy the highest percentages,which reveals that these videos mainly describe the truths and the promises.When it comes to the textual meaning,the majority of the unmarked thematic sentences in these videos offer the information directly and a few marked thematic sentences attach importance to the place information.Third,almost half of the images have no verbal mode to support.In the other half of the images,the three relations between text and images are relay,anchorage and illustration.From the analysis,it can be concluded that the visual mode exerts a crucial part in the entire meaning construction.In terms of offering the more direct and integrated meaning,the verbal mode is necessary.The study is hoped to help readers enjoy the promo videos better and provide a perspective of combination of verbal mode and visual mode for the researchers to do the study of promo videos.