| Multimodal discourse analysis(MDA)accounts for discourse meanings and communicative functions constructed through multimodal symbolic resources.Picture news,as an indispensable part of human communication,has long been a popular subject for MDA.The online news gallery is a new type of picture news discourse promoted by the new media technology,which significantly represents a distinct online combination of visual and verbal resources that have been traditionally used in the press.However,this discourse has been paid little attention by discourse analysts as a distinct discourse type.Thus examining online news galleries under a lens of MDA so as to understand its features in resource choosing and meaning construction,is contributive not only to enriching the empirical study of MDA,but to promoting both the public and professional understanding on it and to offering a new perspective for the creation and evaluation of online news galleries.This study assumes the online news gallery as a distinct discourse type that has its accordant preferences for semiotic resources,modal interactions and its mediation with the online environment,resulting as a discourse in its own right with distinct structural features and communicative intentions.To verify those assumptions,the study is to explore the discourse features of online news galleries from the perspective of MDA.In order to fulfill that,it aims to answer three research questions in detail:1)What are the features of visual and verbal elements in news galleries?2)How are the visual and verbal elements constructed into the news gallery as a coherent multimodal discourse?3)How does its webpage-based context interact with the choices on textual construction in news galleries so as to realize its “online” nature?Mainly under the guidance of Systemic Functional Linguistics,the present study has integrated methods for analyzing verbal text,images,and webpages(chiefly including Halliday’s ideas of metafunctions and cohesive device,Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar,Painter et al.’s visual narrative analytical framework,van Leeuwen’s visual linking,Martinec and Salway’s system of image-text relations,and Bateman’s GeM model),and on the basis of related research at home and abroad,established a multimodal discourse analysis framework for online news galleries,to direct the actual analytical process.Through a nine-month-long collecting work,sixty online news galleries from the official websites of five popular domestic news media have been selected,of which the images,text,image-text relations,image sequences and caption sequences are analyzed with the help of Nvivo 11.The major findings in accordance with the three research questions are presented as follows:(1)Visual and verbal elements have respectively demonstrated features in resource choosing and meaning construction.For the visual,the available devices include the choice of image type(naturalistic and combo photographs),of visual processes(wide use of narrative representing,particularly the action and reactional process)and the use of watermark as attribution.Via naturalistic photographs,news authors not only objectively represent the reality,but facilitate their cooperation with other possible elements into a large discourse;and via combo photographs,authors contrast,compare and classify the visual content.Through narrative representing,authors raise the potential of news galleries for visual storytelling.Action and reactional processes are unevenly preferred to realize the bifunctions of dynamic narrating and emotion provoking.Through the selective use of watermarks,institutional identities and guarantee of the credibility of content are attached to galleries.For the verbal,a caption contains the content and the attribution.Available linguistic devices include the use of “lead”,the choice of text form(narration-like or label-like)and the text status(subordinate or not,via the use of lexico-grammatical reference and verb tense).Capitalizing upon largely-used paragraphs as the narration-like caption,the limited use of lexico-grammatical reference,and the widely-adopted present tense,news authors build up captions’ potential to tell a detailed story themselves and position them as independent and equal to the images in meaning construction.(2)Visual and verbal elements collaborate with each other to construct image-caption pairs,image sequence and caption sequence,which collectively build up a coherent multimodal discourse.Images and caption attributions are linked by a “process of being” which is the verbal acknowledgment of the image source.Choices on the source(external or internal),the professionalism(professional or amateurish)and the authorship(acknowledged or not),reveal the edited news topic,gallery type,and the identity and position of news agency and practitioners.Image and caption content is linked,on ideational meanings,through the intersemiotic relations of anchoring,extending and identifying.Via anchoring in varying degrees,captions reiterate the visual content,embody its elusive part,and relocate readers’ attention from the objective event to the emotional perception towards it;via extending(realized by text form and verb tense),gallery authors expand the role of verbal semiotic resource in storytelling;and via identifying,enhance the acquiescence in image-caption relatedness,and at the same time,through varied degrees,imply the focus of the news reports.Images are related into sequence through the connections of participant and circumstance.Via complete reappearing,(adjacent)metonymic reappearing of characters,maintained location and path-guided location shift,authors promote the cohesive linking of images.These choices render the images as varied,similar and repeated from/with each other,which determines the vividness of the visual story.Images could be organized by time(chronological,intertwined or simultaneous),by thematic relation,or by collective relation,via which distinct types of image sequences are construct oriented by persons and deeds,events and activities,newsworthiness,and concepts and ideas.Captions are linked through text uniqueness(identical,patterned or different),text status(nucleus-satellite with a “lead” or parallel without a “lead”)and text relations(cohesive or stand-alone).Via patterned captions and a “lead” bearing the core content,gallery authors elaborate the primary information and the general theme of the news.Through the selective employment of reference,ellipsis,and substitution in a varied degree,captions are built into cohesion,or as stand-alone.These three linguistic devices interrelate to each other,and interactive with their image-caption relations as well.News galleries make the best of its multimodality with the indispensable role assigned to its verbal and visual resources.Any single choice of meaning-making is the result from the mediation with the whole discourse tenor and its communitive intention,of which the configuration produces news galleries in different kinds as a picture story,a photo essay,or a picture gallery.(3)Webpages are the base for news gallery construction and enhance it as a complete meaning entity,and the distinct structure and features of news galleries in meaning-making are an adaptation to its complex webpage environment.In one respect,through layout and navigation design(such as the adjacent position of images and captions,separation of pairs on different pages,larger proportion of space occupied,the upper and central position at the whole webpage,a great many of hyperlinks for traversing between units),gallery authors facilitate the close association between image-caption,image sequence and caption sequence;in another,via the diversity in news gallery construction,the stand-aloneness of the image-caption pairs,galleries are accommodated to the fickle prospective reading-paths so as to lower the risk of overturning the completeness of reading experience.Online news galleries are the products from reader’s initiative on reading paths,are very versions of readers’ actual cognition and recognition of a commonly fixed entry.Thus,it is a “readerly” discourse that has its “online” nature in the chaotic interaction with readers that dynamically cultivates the changeful communicative products.Viewing the online news gallery as a distinct discourse type,this study has expanded the application of MDA and called for a comprehensive,genre-specific analytical framework,which could offer a reference to related studies in the future.Bedside,systematically exploring the choosing and integrating of meaning recourses so as to capture specific features of multimodal news discourse contributes not only to improving the public multiliteracy but to inspiring news practitioners’ rethink about their professionalism concerning online multimodal news discourse construction,consequently promoting the development of online multimodal news discourse. 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