A Multimodal Approach To Transitivity Analysis In Huawei Publicity Films

With the rapid development of science and technology,there has been an increasing interest in analyzing non-verbal modes of communication such as,gestures,speech sounds,gaze,images,colors,videos etc.other than language.The publicity film is a typical dynamic multimodal discourse since both the visual modes and the auditory inodes are involved to construct meaning together.With the systemic functional grammar(SFG)and visual grammar(VG)as guidance,this thesis aims to analyze different modes used in the transitivity system in Huawei publicity films.The reason for choosing the publicity films as the research object is that although many scholars both at home and abroad have conducted researches by making transitivity analysis on different types of discourses,they focus more on the literary works,political and news discourse,the studies about transitivity analysis are still not comprehensive.To conduct the research,a multimodal corpus called CHPF(Corpus of Huawei Publicity Films)is constructed by the transcription of four videos.Based on the transitivity system theory of Halliday,six transitivity process types have been classified,the visual images and speech sounds of the transitivity process types are illustrated to investigate the interactive relation pattern of the different modes.To guarantee the credibility of the study,some instruments such as the multitier analytical tool—ELAN(EUDICO Linguistic Annotator)and the phonetic software Praat are enployed.Based on the data,it is found that material process,relational process,mental process and verbal process do exist in Huawei publicity films.Material process,relational process and mental process are the main processes in corporate publicity films.In the visual mode,close distance,oblique angle and offer contact are adopted by the film producers to establish the relation between the represented participants and viewers.The transitivity features of Huawei publicity films are also demonstrated after the transitivity analysis.Firstly,the first person pronouns play the dominant part in the Actor of the material process,and they shorten the distance between the customers and enterprise.Secondly,positive process verbs are employed to express the positive attitudes and convey the information to the audience objectively.Thirdly,the expectations and feelings can be reflected by the use of the cognitive mental verbs.These features are not only found in the verbal mode,but also embodied in the visual modes and auditory modes.This study nade from an interactive approach is hope to be conductive not only to enrich the previous studies on transitivity system,but also prove the feasibility of the multimodal interactive approach to transitivity analysis in the corporate publicity films.