A Multimodal Discourse Analysis On The Belt And Road Forum Publicity Films

With the development of science and technology,the multimodal discourse that contains verbal mode,visual mode and many other different modes emerges accordingly.Meanwhile,Multimodal Discourse Analysis has been proved to provide effective approaches and theories for analyzing multimodal text.As a typical multimodal discourse,forum publicity films have a high research value in the aspects of publicizing meetings,building images,and disseminating ideas.However,very little research on forum publicity films has been done from the perspective of Multimodal Discourse Analysis,leaving much space to be exploited.Based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar,Kress’ s Visual Grammar and Zhang Delu’s Synthetic Theoretical Framework of Multimodal Discourse Analysis,this thesis makes a multimodal discourse analysis qualitatively and quantitatively on the selected forum publicity films,Across Mountains and Seas and Achievements of BRI with the help of an annotation tool,ELAN,aiming to analyze how verbal mode and visual mode work together to construct the meaning in a certain context in the selected videos.The major findings are as follows: At the context level,when introducing the Chinese approach,the selected forum publicity films emphasize the cultural exchanges and highlight the cultural integration between China and the Belt and Road countries.The semiotic resources about the expression of the five aspects of connectivity in Belt and Road Initiative(BRI)are widely used.Through the official publicity combined with multiple modes,these videos depict the progress of Belt and Road vividly,echoing the topic and theme of the forum,and reflect the image of China as a responsible country.Consequently,it helps to improve the audience’s correct understanding towards BRI and increase their expectations for this forum.In terms of meaning construction of modes in the selected publicity films,for verbal mode,material process that introduces achievement of BRI takes a majority proportion.All clauses mentioned are declarative and modal operators are rarely used.Unmarked themes and simple themes are frequently used,so that the audience is available to comprehend the content of videos easily.As for visual mode,action process and analytical process are used frequently,in which the former mainly presents the representative scenes of BRI construction and the latter largely denotes the relationship of five aspects of connectivity.The selected videos adopt more “offer” and public distance angles,furthermore,in order to enhance the images’ appeal,the shots in horizontal perspective and high modality are much more employed.A large number of visual compositions place the salient information in the middle,besides,many shots utilize the technique of shading,one of features in Chinese painting to build sharp demarcations,thus creating an atmosphere with strong Chinese style in the image.In the synergy between verbal mode and visual mode,both modes cooperate with each other in a complementary relation,to be specific,the prominent and extended relation in the reinforcement and the coordinated relation in the non-reinforcement are widely used.In brief,this thesis attempts to analyze the meaning construction of verbal mode and visual mode by taking Belt and Road Forum publicity films as data so as to provide some effective reference for a better understanding of multimodal discourse research.