City Branding On Global Social Media:A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Tweets From Official Olympic Twitter Accounts@Beijing2022and@Tokyo2020

City branding describes individuals’ perception and evaluation of a city.Against the background of globalization,competition between cities is intensifying.Cities all over the world have been engaged in building their own brand for global competitiveness.With the development of information technology,the media channels for city brand construction have diversified,with city branding discourse including not only verbal resources,but also the semiotic resources of various modalities such as texts,images,videos,etc.Thus,most studies on the city branding discourse generally take the multimodal analysis approach which analyzes the role of non-linguistic symbols in meaning construction.As for the research on the multimodal analysis of city branding discourse,much of the current literature pays attention to the city branding practices on traditional mass media,such as advertisements,posters,and publicity films.There are relatively few studies focusing on the city branding discourse on new media channels,such as social media.Based on the systemic functional linguistics and the visual narrative theory,this research proposes the analytical framework for multimodal city branding discourse on social media,and analyzes the verbal resources and visual resources on the official Olympic Twitter accounts@Beijing2022 and@Tokyo2020.Both quantitative and qualitative methods are used to analyze and compare the city brands constructed in terms of the ideational meaning,interpersonal meaning,and textual meaning.The specific research questions include:(1)What are the city brands constructed on@Beijing2022 and@Tokyo2020?(2)What multimodal discourse strategies are used on@Beijing2022 and@Tokyo2020?(3)What are the possible reasons for the differences between city brands constructed on@Beijing2022 and@Tokyo2020?The major findings of this research are summarized as follows:(1)@Beijing2022 constructs its city brand focusing on the special bond between Beijing and the Olympic Games,with the city brand of Beijing as a "dual Olympic city":the first city hosting both the Summer and Winter Olympic Games in the world;@Tokyo2020 constructs the brand of Tokyo as "a city where differences shine",focusing on Tokyo’s attribute of inclusiveness.In addition,the brand of cities in Japan other than Tokyo is also constructed in@Tokyo2020 as the "cities united by emotion".(2)In terms of multimodal discourse strategies applied to city branding,relational and material processes,declarative mood structure are used by both@Beijing2022 and@Tokyo2020 for the verbal resources.As for the visual resources,@Beijing2022 mainly uses metonymic character manifestation and sustained inter-circumstance relation to present the events and scenes in Beijing;@Tokyo2020 mainly uses complete character manifestation and varied inter-circumstance relation to emphasize people in the city;(3)The context of culture is a key element influencing city branding on@Beijing2022 and@Tokyo2020:@Beijing2022 constructs its city brand of Beijing as the"dual Olympic city",which actually implies the contrastive meaning between Beijing in 2022 and Beijing in 2008,presenting the rapid development of the economy and technology over the last 15 years.Besides,the Chinese culture of sustainability also contributes to constructing a city brand emphasizing the sustainability of Olympic culture in Beijing.@Tokyo2020 constructs the city brand of Tokyo as "a city where differences shines" and cities other than Tokyo as "cities united by emotion".Individualism and collectivism are integrated as the city branding practice on twitter is carried out in the global context.Drawing on systemic functional linguistics and visual narrative theory,this research proposed the framework for multimodal analysis of city branding discourse on social media,which provided implications for multimodal discourse analysis and city branding discourse analysis at the theoretical level.In addition,by the comparative analysis of city branding practices on@Beijing2022 and@Tokyo2020,this research also provided implications for city brand promoters to design and orientate city brand construction on social media at the practical level.