New Visual Narrative Analyses On Shi Changhong’s Multimodal Design Pictures Of Twenty-four Solar Terms

It took a year for Shi Changhong to design and publish the dynamic pictures of Twenty-four Solar Terms into a book,which vividly expresses the cultural connotation and Chinese elements by using various symbols such as words,images,colors,sounds,etc.As a cultural treasure of which Chinese people feel proud,it also has many cultural significance and social functions in modern society.However,so far,Twenty-four Solar Terms has rarely been studied from the linguistic perspective.This thesis combines Painter et al.’ s new framework for visual narrative analysis with Zhang Delu’s mode of Multimodal Discourse Analysis,and employs a qualitative analysis to explore the characteristics of cognitive semantic meaning and visual narrative of the dynamic pictures of Twenty-four Solar Terms.And this thesis is going to probe into the following three research questions:(1)How do visual modality and verbal modality construct meaning in the dynamic pictures of Twenty-four Solar Terms?(2)What characteristics of the meaning construction are presented in the dynamic pictures of Twenty-four Solar Terms?(3)How is the relationship between verbal modality and visual modality constructed in the dynamic pictures of Twenty-four Solar Terms?The study shows that: on the culture level,the ideologies containing the cultures of Chinese Buddhism,Chinese Zodiac,ancient Chinese characters,Gan Zhi chronology and Twenty-four Solar Terms function as the internal cultural contextavailable for all semiotic systems in the dynamic pictures of Twenty-four Solar Terms.And the genre in the communicating form of design picture determines that dynamic picture inevitably consists of various modalities such as language,image,sound and color.On the context level,field refers to the instantiation of ideology,tenor delves into the relationship between the designer and depicted characters as well as the relationship between viewers and depicted characters,mode means the cooperating working mechanism between language system and image system.On the content level,in terms of image modality,the narrative process is more used to construct ideational meaning but the inter-event relations are not clear.In the interpersonal meaning construction,focusing mode is single non-interactive objective angle of view.The pathos system is not real enough in that the drawing style of participants is almost confined to minimalist style.The ambience system has high degree of familiarity.Green is often utilized to present vibrant atmosphere,cold colors including blue,green and purple are applied to depict cool and cold atmosphere while warm colors comprising red and orange are employed to delineate humid and hot weather together with joyous festival.In the textual meaning construction,the visual narrative is more involved than verbal narrative.According to the law of information cognition,image in the complementary layout is positioned into the central place of picture.Meanwhile,image and language are separated in position but connected by semantic meaning.With regard to language modality,the material process in transitivity system accounts for the largest proportion and highlights the natural phenomena and human activities of each solar term.As for the modality relationship,language modality and visual modality are the complementary relation of reinforcement,in which visual modality is the major modality strengthened and supplemented by language modality.This study attempts to make a visual narrative analysis of dynamic discourse,and its feasibility provides a new perspective for the design of dynamic pictures and offers a mode of linguistic analysis for dynamic design pictures.On the other hand,the analysis of Twenty-four Solar Terms from the linguistic perspective helps to improve the aesthetic literacy and cognition of readers,to better promote the international dissemination of Twenty-four Solar Terms and to carry forward Chinesenation’s historical culture.