A Comparative Study Of Interpersonal And Interactive Meaning In Chinese And British Universities' English Promotional Videos From Multimodal Perspective

Multimodal discourse involves the meaning made by multiple semiotic resources,such as language,image and sound etc.and realizes its communicative function through people's sensory channels like visual channel,auditive channel and olfactory channel etc.The emergence of multimodal discourse embodies the multiplicity of communication media and communication modes.Therefore,multimodal discourse analysis should include all semiotic resources and modalities which construe the meanings of discourse,especially the ones playing dominant roles.At present,multimodal discourse analysis has become one of the hot research areas in linguistics,especially its analysis and study based on the theories of Systemic Functional Linguistics.The existing studies of multimodal discourse usually focus on such genres as advertisements,movies,TV programs and teaching materials etc.Few researches,however,have been conducted on the universities' promotional videos,let alone their comparative studies.Universities' English promotional videos may be considered as the visual name cards of universities in that they play important roles in enlarging the universities'influence overseas and accelerate their process of internationalization.As typical dynamic multimodal discourses integrating visual modality and auditive modality,universities'English promotional videos are intended to construe and express the contents of discourse,attitude of the producers and purpose of communication mainly by dint of voice-overs and dynamic images,which consequently forges relationships with viewers and affects the attitude and behavior of the viewers.In view of their significance,this study selects interactive English promotional videos of 3 Chinese"Double First-Class" universities and 3 British top universities as the subjects of the present research,makes a comparative study of the distributions of interpersonal meaning in language and interactive meaning in images of these Chinese and British universities'English promotional videos with the intention of revealing their similarities and differences and exploring the possible reasons behind them.This study adopts qualitative and quantitative methods.The texts and static images of Chinese and British universities' English promotional videos are obtained respectively by transcribing and using software.Based on the framework of Martin's Appraisal Theory along with Kress and Van Leeuwen's Visual Grammar,the interpersonal resources in language and interactive resources in images are manually annotated.By means of statistical analysis software SPSS 22.0,the distribution data of interpersonal and interactive resources are calculated and then analyzed comparatively.The results are as follows:1.In the distribution of appraisal resources which reflect interpersonal meaning in language,the proportions of them employed by both sides are extremely similar with the exception of contract resources,the proportions of which utilized by both sides have significant difference.To be specific,counter resources are the most frequently used contract resources in Chinese universities' English promotional videos,while pronounce resources predominate in British universities' English promotional videos.2.In the distribution of interactive resources in images,proportions of social distance resources,attitude resources and parts of modality resources used by both sides are remarkably similar.However,there exists significant difference in the proportions of contact resources employed by both sides.Specifically,more offer shots are found in Chinese universities' English promotional videos compared with British universities' English promotional videos where more demand images turn up.Besides,in terms of modality resources,significant differences are found in the distribution of representation and brightness of images in both sides.3.The similarities of interpersonal and interactive meaning in both sides are attributed to the genre of the multimodal discourse.Their differences lie in the distinctive modes of thinking and culture character of Chinese and British plus unique styles of filming for the purpose of special visual effects.Through comparative study,this thesis reveals the similarities and differences in the construction of interpersonal meaning in language and interactive meaning in images between Chinese and British universities' English promotional videos along with their reasons.By doing so,we have improved our ability to comprehend multimodal discourses.We also hope that this study will offer some reference and help to the production of universities' English promotional videos henceforth.