Synergy Of Different Modes In Dynamic Multimodal Discourse

The ways of information dissemination and people's communication have changed a lot because of the rapid development of new science and information technology.Communication is no longer conducted with language alone,but various communicative mode such as space,gestures,gaze,movement,music,three-dimensional things,spoken language,written language,images,charts and so on.Multimodal communication has increasingly become one of the important communication types.Since its appearance in the 1990s,multimodal discourse analysis has received a lot of attention of various scholars in the field of linguistics from home and abroad.So far,researches on multimodal discourse analysis are mainly about the study and construction of theories on multimodal discourse analysis.Their focus is on the analysis of static multimodal discourses,such as newspapers,magazines,posters and so on.However,researches on the analysis of dynamic multimodal discourse are limited.The existing researches on dynamic discourses are mainly concerned with advertising discourses or movie discourses based on systemic functional linguistics or visual grammar.Researches on how different modes in dynamic multimodal discourse interact with each other to co-construct the discourse meaning are limited.Public speech is a typical kind of dynamic multimodal discourse.Domestic and foreign scholars rarely pay their attention to the analysis of public speech from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis.Therefore,based on the previous researches in the field of multimodal discourse analysis and public speech,this research chooses a relatively new research object--one piece of TED speech video.It 'analyzes the synergy of different modes in the meaning-making process of this dynamic multimodal discourse based on Zhang Delu's(2011)synthetic theoretical framework of dynamic MDA(multimodal discourse analysis).First,for sake of analysis,this dynamic speech video is cut into five stages which are transcribed into 28 static images according to the transcription methods of Baldry,Thibault and Zhang Delu.Event is regarded as the minimum analytical units of meaning and each event is realized by one image in the discourse level.Later,the author gives a detailed analysis of the sample speech video under the framework of Zhang Delu's(2011)synthetic theoretical framework for dynamic MDA(multimodal discourse analysis)from three aspects:the culture level,context level and content level.The emphasis of this study is put on the analysis of the content level to revel the relations of different modes during the meaning making process of this discourse.Through the detailed analysis of the chosen data,this study gets the following findings.First,there are two modes involved in this dynamic multimodal discourse,the auditory mode and the visual mode.The auditory mode is the main mode which domains the communication process and is always in the foreground.Second,the relation between these two modes is mainly the complementary relation which includes two kinds:reinforcement relation and non-reinforcement relation.Third,the choice of different mode is not completely free or arbitrary.The choice of modes differs according to the difference of communication purpose.