The Multimodal Analysis On The Interactive Meaning Of The Documentary China: Time Of Xi

With the advent of the multimedia era,a single channel of language can no longer meet people's needs of abundant information.The choices of modes such as images,music and colors,and the ways of different modes cooperation in expressing integrate meaning have become the focuses among current studies.Documentary,a typical multimodal discourse that attracts the researchers' attention gradually,can reveal the producer's particular choice from the selection of materials,filming,interviews,soundtracks and post-editing to the final completion of a video.The documentary China: Time of Xi,produced by the Discovery Channel,is adopted as a corpus.Based on the interpersonal function of Halliday's systemic functional grammar,the interactive meaning of Visual Grammar of Kress and van Leeuwen and Zhang's Inter-Semiotic Relations,three typical clips in the documentary are selected for multimodal text analysis with the help of Multimodal Analysis Video(MMAV).In the verbal mode,there are 227 clauses in total,of which the declarative mood structure accounts for as high as 96%,mainly for providing information.The question and imperative moods are about 4%.Even though their frequency is far lower than the declarative mood,they contribute a lot to interact with viewers for arousing attention and interest.In the modality system,the expressions of probability and usuality account for more than 60%,indicating the authenticity of the content expressed in the documentary.Other expressions of inclination and obligation reflected by the producer are used to affect the attitude of the audience.In the visual mode,the contact,perspective,social distance and modality of the images are explored.It is found that the shots of indirect address in each clip occupy more than 60%,which implies that the main function of the documentary is to provide information.Furthermore,the shots with high visual modality surpass 99% to ensure the authenticity of the information.A great number of eye-level shots show the equality between the audience and the characters in the film(also interactive and represented participants)from the vertical perspective.Meanwhile,when it comes to the horizontal perspective,the distribution of frontal and oblique shots keeps balance to fully display the life of the characters.Lastly,similar frequency of the close,medium and long shots represents different kinds of social distance,which aims to provide a relatively comprehensive life of the characters in the documentary for the audience and foster them to understand changes and reasons inside.Through the analysis of the relationship between the images and texts,it is found that images and texts complement with each other as a kind of reinforcement.At the same time,with background music,the documentary achieves the interaction with the audience.This research not only enlarges the application field of Visual Grammar in dynamic multimodal discourse analysis on the basis of Kress and van Leeuwen's Visual Grammar and Halliday's functional grammar,but also enhances the readers' multimodal literacy.