A Comparative Study Of The Interactive Meaning Of Multimodal Discourses In Beijing And London Publicity Films

With the development of multimedia technology,language is not the only mode to transfer information,image,music,gesture and other means can be used alone or simultaneously to construct meaning.As a result,a new research area of discourse analysis arises.Multimodal Discourse Analysis(MDA)refers to the analysis of different semiotic modes(vision,hearing,touch,smell,etc.)in a text or more than one semiotic resource in a mode(Zhang Dongmei,2014).Since MDA appeared in the 1990 s,many linguists and scholars did much research in this domain.City publicity film integrates video with text,music,sound and many other resources to present the unique information,so it's a kind of appropriate data and many studies have been conducted on it.However,there is scarcely any study on the comparison of city publicity films.Therefore,the author in this study analyzed the city publicity films of Beijing and London on basis of Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar(SFG)and Kress & Van Leeuwen's Visual Grammar(VG).The study intends to find out how interaction is achieved through a variety of semiotic resources and to explore the possible reasons for the similarities and differences.The following are the research questions of the study:1)How is the interactive meaning achieved through verbal discourses in Chinese and English City Publicity Films respectively?2)How is the interactive meaning achieved through non-verbal discourses in Chinese and English City Publicity Films respectively?3)What are the similarities and differences and the possible reasons for them in the realization of the interactive meaning through multimodal discourses in the two films?With quantitative and qualitative research methods in data analysis,this study focuses on data from the two films,which are carefully selected from YouKu based on the principle of authenticity and representativeness.The two films are 271 seconds(Beijing)and 217 seconds(London)long respectively.The verbal discourses are transcribed from the subtitles,and the non-verbal discourses are pictures segmented from the videos according to Film Segmentation Method.The transcribed and segmented data in the two films end up with 141 words and 97 pictures in Beijing Publicity Film and 223 words and 25 pictures in London Publicity Film.Firstly,the author analyzed the interactive meaning of the verbal and non-verbal discourses based on SFG and VG respectively.Next the author compared the realization of the interactive meaning of MDA in the two films,and then got the similarities and differences and concluded the possible reasons for the similarities and differences found in the data.The findings can be summarized into the following:First of all,for the verbal discourse,the Chinese Publicity Film used more declaratives than imperative clause and more expressions of modalization.While all clauses in the English Publicity Film are declaratives and it preferred to use expressions of modalization,too.Then,for the non-verbal discourse,the Chinese Publicity Film used a few eye contacts,many close-up shots and medium shots,frequent head-up perspective and high modality.While no eye contact occurred in the English Publicity Film,and it used more medium shots and long shots,frequent front angle,look-up and head-up perspective,and low modality.Finally,on the similarities and differences on the interactive meaning,the two publicity films have similarities in nearly every analytical perspective.However,there are more differences,for instance,the English Publicity Film used declaratives alone and preferred low modality.The differences result in different emphasis in the two city publicity films.The Chinese one manages to show every aspect of Beijing with full color and sound;it's a synchronic description.While the English one stresses to present a sense of vicissitudes but also sense of advances of London;it's a diachronic description.As far as the possible reasons for the similarities and differences are concerned,purpose of publicity films as well as shooting methods and represented participants may lead to the similarities and differences of the two publicity films respectively.But no matter how,cultural background,ideology and aesthetic concept are spiritually influencing the realization of the interactive meaning in the two city publicity films.Theoretically,this study verifies the feasibility of analysis based on SFG and VG in multimodal data.Practically,the findings reveal that understanding of multimodal data is challenging as it involves understanding of different means of information.In spite of the author's effort,there are still limitations in this study.There are only two city publicity films analyzed and compared,and other meta-functions,i.e.the representational meaning and the compositional meaning,are not involved.These are remaining issues for further research.