Construction Of Multimodal Speech Discourse Appraisal Meanings

This research attempts to analyze Chai Jing’s eco-documentary Under the Dome from the Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis approach and expound what and how appraisal meanings are constructed through multiple modalities to pass on the author’s attitude to the audience,thereby influencing their value position,and further dig out what ideologies are hidden behind the discourse event.Multimodal discourse analysis on this film is conducted on the theoretical basis of Martin’s Appraisal Theories and interactional meanings subsumed into Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar.Through the multiple sampling and a detailed analysis of texts and five shots(including 8-14 frames respectively)selected from the documentary,the author has gained the following research findings: 1)images and verbal languages can co-construct the appraisal meanings of a multimodal discourse.Chai firstly fashions language to express her own attitude towards smog in China explicitly,and then quotes a lot of researches and statistics(images)to objectively convince the audience of the serious air pollution at home;2)As images can help construct the evaluative orientations for the follow-up discourse,all kinds of non-verbal resources are used to construct the speaker’s evaluations(‘victim’)of smog issue and meanwhile provoke evaluative reaction(‘victim consciousness’)in the audience.Backed by all the above-mentioned multimodal resources,she tries to establish a social alliance with the audience to protest against their ‘powerless’ situation.Chai,playing as a ‘victim’ in her speech,appeals to the ‘powerless’ publics to protest against the ‘powerful’ institutions rather than arouse publics’ consciousness of environmental protection,as an eco-documentary is supposed to.This research prompts us to rethink how to talk about ‘Chinese environmental issues’ to improve the environment in specific context where the relationship between social media and official censorship under China’s current conditions seems contradictory in a political fashion.