An Interactive Approach To Modal Adjuncts In Multimodal Discourses

Modal adjuncts used as adverbials in clauses may not have the potential of being a subject,but they do contribute to the construction of interpersonal meaning in the mood structure.With the rapid development of science and technology,multimodal discourses are presented in not only verbal mode,but also audio mode,visual mode,etc.Thus,modal adjuncts as a kind of verbal mode,together with other modes will surely cooperate and interact to establish multimodal meanings.With both the systemic functional grammar and visual grammar used as the theoretical framework,this thesis is to analyze the interactive meaning of modal adjuncts in different modes in Initial Public Offering(IPO)roadshow videos.The reason for choosing the IPO roadshow videos is that previous scholars pay less attention to the study in business speeches compared with that on political speeches.IPO roadshow video combined with images,speakers’ speech,background music,semiotic illustration and gestures is good to make a business publicity discourse.Such composition is easier to explore the interactive meaning of modal adjuncts in varied modes.To conduct the research,a corpus the CBPDRV(Corpus of Business Publicity Discourse of Roadshow Video)is constructed by the transcription of two videos,the Facebook IPO roadshow video and the Alibaba roadshow video.Since both the two companies are international,influential all over the world and listed in New York Stock Exchange,their IPO roadshow videos are believed to share the same targeted audiences and purposes.So the chosen IPO roadshow videos are representing the world leading business publicity discourse.Two videos last about 65 minutes and are transcribed for the convenience of verbal analysis.What’s more,the multitier analytical tool—ELAN(EUDICO Linguistic Annotator)is employed to construe the interactive meaning of the researched modal adjuncts.Based on the collected data,it is found that speakers tend to build the interpersonal meaning by employing the high-expected adjuncts of intensity,non-future adjuncts of temporality,unqualified speech-functional comment adjuncts(SFCAs)and degrees of usuality of adjuncts of modality in the verbal mode.While in the image and gestures,the represented participants mainly employ the offer eye-contact,social distance,frontal angle and zero gesture(ZG)to establish the interactive meaning to viewers.The interactive relationship among these modes of modal adjuncts is complementary.This study on modal adjuncts made from an interactive approach is hope to be conductive not only to enrich the previous studies on modal adjuncts,but also prove the effectiveness and feasibility of the multimodal interactive approach to modal adjuncts in business publicity discourse.