A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Smartphones' English Webpages

Nowadays,discourse analysis is not limited to the language and other verbal modalities.It also includes the analysis of multimodal modalities.However,few researches made discourse analysis on smartphones' English webpages,which combines several modalities to achieve the goal of transmitting information.Therefore,this thesis will make a multimodal discourse analysis of these webpages from the aspect of texts,images,typography and image-text relationship.The data is from the webpages of top 5 smartphone brands' best sellers in 2015 published by TrendForce in January,2016.The texts,images,typography and image-text relationship in the data are analyzed with different devices.Texts are analyzed in terms of mood and modality under interpersonal metafunction.Images and typography are analyzed in terms of representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning under visual grammar and typography grammar.And image-text relationship is considered either in equal status or in unequal status.The results show that for each modality,the webpage designers have their preference in choosing devices to present it.Most of the texts on these webpages are expressed by statement mood and probability modality,while conceptual images are a little more adopted than narrative images.And most images are presented at eye level angle to make an offer.An image may be either on the left or right of text,but in a top-bottom position,an image is often on the bottom.Typography is always used to express its compositional meaning more than representational meaning and interactive meaning.In most cases,the relationship between images and texts is equal,presenting by complementary.