A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of City Image Promotional Films

A large variety of semiotic signs or media are increasingly playing a significant role in daily interactions nowadays and multimodal discourse analysis has gradually become a new way and approach in terms of discourse analysis.However,the studies having been made so far are mainly focused on posters,magazines or other static multimodal discourses,so there is great spaces for researches on dynamic ones in terms of quantity or domain of studies.Besides,for the studies on dynamic multimodal discourse having been found,most of them are conducted to make out meaning construction of verbal and visual modalities as well as the cooperation between them,while the discussion about auditory modality is extremely rare.In addition,city image promotional films are typically a kind of dynamic multimodal discourse,incorporating multiple semiotic resources like verbal language,image,sound,etc.For the previous studies on such type of discourse,they are far from enough and comprehensive in quantity and in research domain respectively about meaning construction from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis.Therefore,the thesis adopts qualitative method to make a research on Hangzhou,an English version of excellent city image promotional film released by the official on Tencent.Based on Halliday’s three metafunctions in Systemic Functional Grammar,Kress & van Leeuween’s three meanings in Visual Grammar,van Leeuween’s perspective in Aural Grammar and different relations among modalities proposed by Zhang Delu,the thesis discusses different meaning construction processes of verbal and visual modalities respectively as well as the relationship among auditory,verbal and visual modalities within the video Hangzhou.The specific research questions include three:(1)How does the verbal modality construct meaning in Hangzhou?(2)How does the visual modality construct meaning in Hangzhou?(3)What’s the relationship among auditory,verbal and visual modalities in the construction of the overall meaning of Hangzhou?At last,the research results include:(1)in terms of verbal modality,material process,relational process and mental process within transitivity are most frequently used to convey the ideational function of Hangzhou City,covering various aspects of the city.Both mood and modality help to build an intimate relation between the speaker and viewers so as to construct the interpersonal function of the film.Concretely,declarative structure takes up the most largest proportion of mood systemand at the same time,low and high modal operators or adjuncts within modalisation are used the most frequently to convey information to viewers both politely and powerfully and the use of median modal operators within modulation at a low frequency contributes to making viewers more easily accept the information about obligation or inclination.In the process of constructing the textual function,plenty of cohesive devices are widely employed,including collation of lexical cohesion,reference,ellipsis and conjunction.(2)In terms of visual modality,narrative process is mostly adopted to represent the city’s cultural customs,high-quality lifestyle,harmonious living atmosphere and positive spiritual outlook while conceptual process takes up a smaller proportion and it’s mainly used to represent magnificent architecture,industrial park,beautiful natural environment and other static information about the city Hangzhou.Therefore,the use of both processes constructs the representational meaning of the video.For the construction of interactive meaning,offering act is used the most frequently and besides,long shot taking up the largest percentage in use effectively helps viewers appreciate the general image of Hangzhou City while medium and close-up shots also help to establish a close relationship with effect between the speaker and viewers although they merely account for a smaller proportion,by which viewers can increase their recognition of the identity of the city.Besides,frontal and eye-level angles are mostly adopted,which helps to establish an intimate relation between represented participants and viewers and the viewers can also increase their sense of participation.Information value,salience and framing are all employed to construct the compositional meaning of the film.As for the dimension of information value,center-margin structure is used the most frequently while topdown and left-right patterns play a secondary role.For salience,the contrast between colors,or positions,or brightness,or size,or shooting perspectives makes crucial visual elements of the city prominent to viewers.Besides,two kinds of framing devices,namely visual technique and dividing line not only help all elements in visual image integrate with each other organically,but also make the salience of information enhanced further.(3)In terms of the relationship among auditory,verbal and visual modalities,it’s reinforced type in general within complementary relation between auditory sound and the other two modalities in the integrations of the three modalities in the video,but when the sounds appear together with visual image in shot,it will be non-reinforced complementary type between these two modalities.As for the relationbetween verbal text and visual shot in the film,it’s also non-reinforced complementary because both of them are complement each other and also indispensable.The research conducted in the thesis deepens both theoretical application and practical analysis,so it has both academic value and practical significance at the macro level.However,the research object just covers one city image promotional film,so the research results can not be generally shared by other videos to some degree.In addition,the aspects involved in the research are also not comprehensive enough and some domains are not discussed like tense and thematic structure in verbal text,modality in visual image,etc.Therefore,for city image promotional films and other similar dynamic multimodal discourses,more scholars need to conduct relevant studies in depth on them.