An Analysis Of Interpersonal Meaning In Multimodal Discourses

Systemic Functional Grammar is not only a grammar for studying pure texts,but also provides a theoretical framework for studying all semiotic systems.Kress and van Leeuwen analyze visual images under the guidance of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics and contribute new methods to the analysis of multimodal discourse.The development of Multimodal Discourse Analysis abroad has entered a mature stage,while China is also in a gradual development stage.In addition,most scholars study the texts of The Economist,but pay less attention to the meanings expressed by the combination of texts and images.This thesis selects 25 cover stories about the latest topic COVID-19 in The Economist from 2020 to 2021 as data.It mixes qualitative and quantitative methods.Based on the theoretical framework of Halliday’s interpersonal meaning and Kress and van Leeuwen’s interactive meaning,this research explores how multimodal discourse constructs interpersonal meanings by verbal modes and visual modes,and how to interact with audiences by two types of modes together.The results of the study are as follows:(1)The Mood,Modality,Person and Attitude systems play important roles in realizing the interpersonal meaning of the texts.The texts frequently use declarative sentences to display objective information about COVID-19 in different countries.The higher proportion of medium and low modality operators,modality adjuncts,and third person pronouns can stabilize people’s hearts to go through the difficulties and improve the objectivity and credibility of texts.Besides,there are slightly more negative attitudes than positive attitudes in the selected texts,but they are both less used in the texts on the whole,indicating that the author tends to narrate more non-personal opinions,avoiding too much influence on readers’ emotions and judgments,and triggering panic and unrest.(2)Contact,Social Distance,Perspective and Modality systems are also significant in realizing the interpersonal meaning of covers.Most of the covers present offer images to provide information and leave room for readers to think about COVID-19.Moreover,there are more middle shots than close-up and long shots,which deepen readers’ overall and specific understanding of COVID-19.Frontal angles,eye-to-eye angles and middle modalities can increase the readers’ sense of participation in the event,attract viewers’ attention and express equal status and enhance the persuasiveness of pictures.(3)Texts and covers are complementary to each other to construct interpersonal meaning.In the background of the competition of text-reading and image-reading,this thesis puts texts and images on equal positions to study their communicative functions,which contribute to improve the ability to understand the content related to COVID-19,enhance people’s reading ability about interpersonal meanings and multimodal discourses.