| The national image is an important intangible asset of a country with a powerful brand effect,which not only affects the international prestige and reputation of the country,but also improves the cohesion of its people.As the largest sporting event in the world today,the Olympic Games provides an opportunity for the host country to solemnly reveal itself to the world and becomes a good stage for presenting and spreading the host country’s national image.The opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympic Games was a great success,allowing the international community to marvel at China’s cultural and historical heritage once again,and successfully constructing China’s national image.From the perspective of Multimodal Discourse Analysis,this thesis adopts Halliday’s Systematic Functional Grammar and Kress & Van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar as the theoretical framework,and applies the qualitative method,takes the video of Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games Opening Ceremony as the research corpus to interpret the multimodal construction of China’s national image in the opening ceremony in order to address the following three questions: 1.What modalities are applied in the video of Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games Opening Ceremony? 2.What are the functions of the different modalities in constructing meaning and how do they cooperate with each other in the opening ceremony? 3.What kind of national image of China do these multimodalities construct?This thesis finally finds that:(1)as a typical multimodal discourse,the opening ceremony of Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics employs different modalities: visual modality mainly applies images to participate in the expression of meaning in three aspects,namely,the representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning;the textual modality emphasizes key messages through the presentation of captions,slogans,theme and words appear on the stage;audio modality creates atmosphere through the live commentary and background music.(2)Different modalities have different roles in the construction of China’s national image: the visual modality visualizes the meaning,which establishes the audience’s initial perception of China’s national image and enhances their understanding;the textual modality supplements information,which plays a certain role in explaining and guiding,and also sublimates the theme;the audio modality constructs a specific context,which enhances the audience’s participation,and arouses their emotional resonance;among which,the visual modality is the main modality,and the textual modality and audio modality play a reinforcing role.(3)the three modalities interact and reinforce each other to build a respectable image of China as an “advocator of inclusiveness”,a lovely image as a “promoter of public engagement” and a credible image as a “guardian of harmony and solidarity”.This study puts the theory of Visual Grammar into practice,providing a new perspective for the study of national image construction and a new angle of appreciation for the viewers of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics.In addition,this study provides a case study for the construction of national image from the perspective of Multimodal Discourse Analysis,hoping that it will have some implications for China’s external communication and national image construction in the future. |
