| As a new paradigm in the field of discourse research,multimodal discourse analysis not only focuses on the characteristics of the language in the process of communication,but also pays attention to the meaning of non-verbal symbols such as actions,gaze and gestures,etc.,so as to provide a more comprehensive perspective of discourse analysis from the micro-level.With the development of globalization,the image of national leaders,as a symbol of the country’s soft power,has attracted more and more scholars’ attention in the world.Previous studies on national leaders’ image construction are mainly limited to the verbal level,however,there is very little research which has been done more comprehensively from the aspect of a combination of verbal and non-verbal modes,leaving much space to be explored.In view of this,based on Martin’s Appraisal Theory and Norris’ Multimodal Interaction Analysis,this thesis takes the selected speech videos delivered by former US president Trump at the White House press conference as the research corpus to analyze the distribution and characteristics of the verbal and non-verbal modes as well as the mode synergy relationship,aiming to explore the process of Trump’s image construction in COVID-19.This thesis makes a relatively holistic multimodal analysis quantitatively and qualitatively of the selected speech videos with the assistance of the UAM Corpus Tool and a multimodal annotation tool ELAN.Some major findings of this thesis are as follows:At the verbal mode level,attitude resources account for the largest proportion,followed by engagement resources and graduation resources.In the attitude system,for the purpose of realizing re-election,the affect resources are used most frequently by Trump to unite the voters and build consensus,which helps him to construct a responsible and dependable leader image.In the engagement system,the exclusive and inclusive use of the first person pronoun in monogloss reveal his real political intentions,which constructs Trump’s leader image of populism and exclusionism.In addition,in order to contract the dialogue space and maintain his autocratic stance,Trump uses the contraction resources much more frequently than expansion resources to limit the existence of other voices,establishing an image of a national leader who puts the political interests above science and puts the international political struggle above the international anti-epidemic cooperation.In the graduation system,the proportion of force resources is much higher than that of focus resources,which further strengthens Trump’s changeable and contradictory image in COVID-19.At the non-verbal mode level,for prosody mode,the frequent use of pause,stress and rising intonation in Trump’s image construction is echoed by the use of attitude resources in verbal mode.Among hand gesture modes,the most frequent use of beat gestures ratchets up the rhetoric.In the meantime,the open posture modes,combined with verbal modes,are able to shape an image of a leader,who is selfish,contradictory and prefers votes rather than people’s lives.In addition,Trump is adept at using intense gaze modes and serious facial expression modes to show a more authoritative interaction relationship,which helps to shape an extremely narcissistic hero individualism presidential image.In terms of mode synergy,the parallel and reinforced relationship is manifested between verbal and non-verbal modes in Trump’s image construction.Through the analysis of verbal and non-verbal modes,the public will have a more objective understanding of the process of Trump’s image construction and the ideology hidden behind the modes as well as the reason for his administration’s failure in dealing with the epidemic.In summary,this thesis attempts to analyze Trump’s image construction in COVID-19 from verbal and non-verbal modes so as to provide some explanations for interpreting the way of image construction of national leaders,and also hopes to broaden the research field of multimodal discourse analysis. |
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