Contrastive Analysis Of The Multimodal Interactive Meanings In Four City Publicity Films

Previously,language(oral or written),in its own right,is not only the main way of meaning construction,but also the main research object of traditional discourse analysis.Nevertheless,with the advancement of science and technology,communication and interaction are increasingly dependent on multimedia technology.Therefore,semiotic resources like images,sounds and colors in quite a few cases play an even more vital role in meaning construction.Since the 1990 s,the role of semiotic resources other than language in the construction of discourse meaning has drawn attention from linguists,which contributes to the development of multimodal discourse analysis in western countries.It has overturned the traditional discourse analysis that merely attaches importance to language,and taken other semiotic resources which were once deemed as paralanguage into consideration for the analysis of discourse meaning.Among the linguists who are caught up in multimodal discourse analysis,Kress and van Leeuwen first proposed the Visual Grammar in 1996 with representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning as the core of the theory,which has provided a solid theoretical foundation for multimodal discourse analysis.Since the introduction of the approach into China,multimodal discourse analysis has attracted the attention of many domestic scholars.In light of the systemic functional linguistics,Zhang Delu has offered a new theoretical framework for multimodal discourse analysis.By pointing out and clarifying the ambiguities in Zhang Delu’s(2009)synthetic theoretical framework for multimodal discourse analysis and integrating it with the Visual Grammar of Kress and van Leeuwen,a modified analytical framework applicable for multimodal discourse like publicity films is suggested by this thesis,which is also the theoretical basis of the present study.Both qualitative and quantitative methods are applied in the present study for the analysis of multimodal interactive meanings of the four city publicity films of Beijing,Shanghai,Tianjin and Chongqing,and the present study probes into the following three questions: Firstly,what interactive meanings are constructed in the four city publicity films through the analysis of “contact”,“social distance” and “attitude”?Secondly,what are the similarities and differences in the realization of the interactive meanings of the four city publicity films? Thirdly,what national images are presented in the four city publicity films and how China’s national images are shaped when constructing the interactive meanings?The present study has applied the theory to case analysis and has made some contributions to the development of multimodal discourse analysis.It is noted that to interpret a publicity film by means of multimodal discourse analysis enables us to have a deeper understanding of its discourse meaning.Besides,this study focuses on the construction of interactive meanings in the four city publicity films,and in addition to that,it also discusses how the national image is shaped in the four city publicity films through the construction of interactive meanings.In short,both theoretical basis and case analysis of the present study distinguishes it from many other multimodal discourse studies of which the content are rich but not very insightful.