| With the coming of the information age and the rapid development of multimedia technology,multimodal information transmission is becoming increasingly common.Environmental news report is a multimodal discourse which integrates words,images and colors.Nevertheless,there are few studies on environmental news images.This paper makes a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the 150 environmental news images from the China Daily website.From the perspective of visual grammar theory,this paper presents the distribution features of multimodal resources in the environmental news images,and studies how the multimodal discourse meaning in environmental news images is constructed from the perspectives of representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning.The study got the following main findings:Firstly,in terms of representational meaning,regarding the action processes,humans are usually in the position of actor and conduct actions of protecting the environment in the selected environmental news images.Concerning the reactional processes,the image producers make use of the eye lines of humans and animals to draw the viewers’ attention to the environmental issues.The effect of such pictures is to lead the viewers outside the image to focus on the environment and achieve resonance with viewers.In the images of speech and mental process,animals and plants are personified as speakers or thinkers,which gives the nonhuman species an equal right to “speak”.While in the conceptual processes,image producers prefer to use symbolic process to convey human care and protection of the nature.Secondly,in terms of interactive meaning,offer act is more frequently used than demand act in the selected images,which shows that the primary task of the environmental news images is to disclose the real events to the readers as much as possible,to report the facts of severe environmental problems and appeal to people to devote themselves to environmental protection.The usage of long shot is higher than that of close shot and medium shot.The long shots give a complete scene with both the participants and the surroundings around in a picture,which presents the harmonious atmosphere between human beings and nature.In addition,the environmental news images use more frontal and eye to eye perspectives to show the participation and equal relationship between participants and viewers.High modality with blue-green background accounts for the highest proportion in the environmental news images,which depicts that human world with buildings and roads is embraced by the lush mountains and green water under the blue sky.Thirdly,in terms of compositional meaning,the arrangement of image elements from the center to the edge is more often used to communicate information value of the environmental images,conveying the composition significance of “important information in the center,auxiliary information at the edge”.When the human beings occupy the center of the pictures,they are paying efforts to solve environmental problems;when animals occupy the center,it makes the viewer realize that the current living conditions of animals are destroyed and full of crisis,and hence arouses people’s awareness to improve the situation.All in all,the selected images reflect the image producers’ ecological thoughts of eco-centrism.This study is hoped to provide references and ideas for environmental news image designers when designing images,and also to help viewers to better interpret the meaning of environmental news images. |
PDF Full Text Request