Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Interactive Meaning In The Broadway Musical Cats

Based on Visual Grammar proposed by Kress &van Leeuwen and Audio Grammar further proposed by van Leeuween,this thesis analyzes the construction of the interactive meaning of the Cats which is one of the four best Broadway musicals in the world in terms of eye contact,social distance,visual and audio perspective,visual and audio modality,melody and so on by combining quantitative and qualitative research methods with the help of multimodal video analysis software Elan.Research questions are listed as follows:(1)How is the interactive meaning constructed in the visual mode of the Cats?(2)How is the interactive meaning constructed in the audio mode of the Cats?(3)How do visual and audio modes interact with each other to construct interactive meaning to serve specific themes in the musical? The main research results are as follows.In the visual mode,after analyzing contact,it is found that the shots of demand and offer are almost evenly distributed,accounting for 50.6% and 49.4% respectively,which implies that the musical Cats not only functions to provide information but also establishes an intimate relationship with the interactive participants to attract them to participate in the interaction with musical figures.The distribution of public distance takes up 40.1%,which is relatively higher than the distribution of personal distance(23%)and social distance(36.9%).In this way,the musical designers lead audiences to experience the life of the characters in the musical world from the perspective of public distance,and thereby provide a panoramic view of the colorful life of the Jellicle family,corresponding to the metaphor of “Jellicle family is a micro human society.” The relatively small amount of employment of personal distance and social distance is conducive to shortening the interactive distance between the represented participants and the audiences.In terms of the horizontal perspective,the distributions of the frontal angle and the oblique angle are nearly balanced,totally occupying 52.3% and 47.7% respectively,which aims to fully show the emotions and lives of characters from different angles.From the vertical perspective,the eye angle covers a percentage of 50.7%,which is higher than the low angle and the high angle with 30.7% and 18.5% respectively.The extensive use of the eye angle reflects the equal power relations between participants and viewers,corresponding to the theme of “respect and love”.The distribution of visual modality varies significantly in different plots,reflecting that the musical designers are good at using the modality of different degrees to create atmosphere of different plots and echo with the theme.In the audio mode,in terms of social distance and perspective,formal distance takes up 34.3%,revealing the formality of the Jellicle Ball and the musical designers' respect for the characters.Besides,the difference in social distance and social status of musical figures can be realized according to the different loudness of characters' sound.From the perspective of melody,the frequency of ascending pitch movement,middle pitch range,and middle key,occupying 40.8%,59.6% and 36.3% respectively,are higher than other contrast resources.These melodies mainly embody the delightful,positive and tolerant feelings of the figures in Cats.Concerning the audio modality,most sounds in Cats belong to high modality except for the chant segment in the beginning part.Finally,through the analysis of mode relations,it is found that the relations among visual and audio modes in Cats mainly involve complementary relation,that is,visual and audio modes coordinate with each other to complete the construction of the whole interactive meaning in the musical,expressing the theme of “respect,love and forgiveness” and promoting plot development.This thesis demonstrates the practicability and practicality of the multimodal discourse analysis for the musical discourse for the first time.It reveals how visual and audio modes interact to construct the interactive meaning in the musical,which provides a multimodal discourse analysis angle in Applied Linguistics field for further musical research.