A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Promos For Beijing's Bid For The 2022 Olympic Winter Games

With the innovation of information technology,modern multimedia technology has also been continuously developing.In this context,the communication mode which is dominated by language has changed,and image,sound,color and other semiotic resources are playing an increasingly important role in the meaning construction of communication.Thus,the multimodal discourse whose communicative meaning is achieved by means of various senses such as visual and auditory senses including a variety of semiotic resources like image,language,music and color caused the attention of scholars,and multimodal discourse analysis emerged as required.Present researches on multimodal discourse analysis mainly concentrate on the static discourses,such as posters and web pages,and there are also studies on dynamic discourses like films,documentaries,etc.Compared with these discourses,the promo for Olympic bid which contains image,sound,color and other semiotic resources is a typical dynamic multimodal discourse.Therefore,based on visual grammar by Kress and van Leeuween and aural grammar by van Leeuween,this thesis makes a multimodal discourse analysis of promos for Beijing's bid for the 2022 Olympic Winter Games,exploring the meaning-making of visual and auditory modalities and the relations between them in realizing the overall meaning.Taking four promos for Beijing's bid for the 2022 Olympic Winter Games as data source,the thesis selects typical shots with various characteristics of multimodality as analysis unit initiated by O'Halloran's analytical framework for film discourse.At the same time,the author makes a concrete analysis of each modality with the help of KMPlayer to decompose shots into frames.Firstly,the author analyzes the representational meaning of the promos from the narrative process and conceptual process,interprets the interactive meaning from the aspects of contact,social distance,perspective and modality,and explains the compositional meaning in terms of information value,salience and framing.Then,the author classifies the auditorymodality according to the perspective in aural grammar and discusses the meaning construction of the auditory modality in the promos.Finally,the author probes into the the relations between two modalities in realizing the overall meaning by selecting sequent shots.Through the analysis,the thesis tries to decode how the meanings of the two modalities are constructed and then find out the effects of promos for Olympic bid on the successful bid.Some major findings of the research can be concluded as follows.Firstly,the following findings are from visual modality analysis.The narrative process and conceptual process in the representational meaning cooperate to embody the Olympic spirits as well as the determination and competence of China to bid for the 2022 Olympic Winter Games.The contribution of both offer acts and demand acts in contact,the constant change of shots in social distance,transformation of angles in perspective and high modality in the interactive meaning together reflect the charm of winter sports and traditional Chinese culture as well as preparations China has made for Olympic bid.Information value,salience and framing in the compositional meaning demonstrate China's passion for winter sports and highlight the integration of Chinese culture,sports and Olympic spirits.Secondly,in the aspect of the auditory modality,the auditory modality in the promos mainly involve the voiceover,the background music and the natural sound.They form a kind of dynamic perspective according to the loudness and prominence,making the audience feel the resolution and enthusiasm of China to bid for the Olympic Winter Games.Thirdly,the primary modality in the promos is the visual modality,with the auditory modality playing the assisting role,whose relationship can be further distributed into reinforcement,extension and interpretation.It is the cooperation of the two modalities that realizes the effect of the audio-visual integration and interprets the overall meaning of the promos.Through the multimodal discourse analysis of the promos for Beijing's Bid for the Olympic Winter Games,this research provides more perspectives for the audience to appreciate the promo and expands the research contents of multimodal discourse analysis.Meanwhile,it may be a reference to the detailed analysis of the meaning construction of modalities and promo makers.