Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of University Publicity Films:A Systematic-functional Perspective

With rapid development in daily communication,dynamic discourses that include varied modalities are more and more widely used in people' s life.Offering effective approaches and theories to analyze dynamic discourses,the multimodal discourse analysis(MDA)has aroused more and more attention.As a typical multimodal text,university publicity film(UPF)is one of the most effective ways for universities to expand their influence by publicizing image and culture.This thesis designs a new theoretical framework that combines Zhang Delu' s “instantiation” and Halliday' s systematic functional grammar(SFG)and Kress' s visual grammar(VG)to make a systematic functional-multimodal discourse analysis(SFMDA)on three successful publicity films,Yale University,Peking University and University of Manchester.It is oriented toward three research questions:(1)How do visual and verbal modes in UPFs construct meaning?(2)During the meaning construction,what features are presented in UPFs?(3)What is the relationship between verbal modality and visual modality? AntConc and ELAN are first employed to transcribe and then code the verbal modes and visual modes to answer these questions.Then qualitative description is made according to the proposed framework with a quantitative analysis on statistics to discover the common features shown in the meaning construction of auditory and visual modality in successful UPFs in order to offer suggestions on multimodal employment to filmmakers.Conclusions are drawn as follows.Verbally,material process,mental process,relational and behavioral process in transitivity systems are employed a lot to realize ideational meaning.As for interpersonal meaning,such systems as declarative and interrogative mood types,modal operators of low value and first person system are mainly used to establish an intimate relationship with the viewers.Moreover,topical theme is used the most frequently to construct the textual meaning.Visually,UPF mainly adopts narrative processes to realize representational meaning.To realize interactive meaning,visual modes prefer to use “offer” in contact system,personal distance and horizontal angle.Concerning the compositional meaning,center,left and right are of great information value.Additionally,perspective,size and color are found as the most frequent techniques in salience system.Also,more framing is employed than no using framing.On the relation between different modalities,auditory modality and visual modality are complementary to each other on the whole.In detail,the relationship between verbal and visual modes is non-reinforcement.It is reinforcement when background music,verbal and visual modes appear together.A SF-MDA of UPFs reveals verbal modes and visual modes present different features from other publicity and advertising discourses when constructing meaning.This research only includes three publicity films,so the conclusion cannot cover all the other UPFs.