Meaning Construction Of Discourse Through Verbal-Visual Modalities From A Functional-Cognitive Perspective

Research paradigms of multimodal discourse analysis are now developing.Systemic Functional Grammar and Visual Grammar as the perspectives of Social Semiotics are major research approaches to this domain;multimodal metaphor and metonymy study which is from a Cognitive Linguistics perspective is also in the ascendant.The study of talk show has developed at home and abroad in these years.This study employs Social Semiotics theories by M.A.K.Halliday and multimodal metaphor and metonymy by Charles Forceville as the theoretical foundations and research approaches to explore the narrative features of a talk show video,and analyzes how major modalities participate in integral meaning construction of this video discourse.The thesis firstly reviews previous literary works about the research status quo as well as development tendency of multimodal discourse analysis and talk show studies,and suggests theories on the basis of Social Semiotics and Cognitive Linguistics.It chooses a tech talk show video from CGTN media named A Day Aboard Wentian as the case to investigate how verbal and visual semiotic resources designed within this video jointly express meaning to the world,devoting to interpreting these elements with a multithinking.This video material takes the launched Wentian module as the displayed object,showing people a brand new overlook of a spacecraft in a vivid and humorous way.It reveals the fact of the unceasing progress of China’s space technology,representing the image of national space industry and promoting a sense of national pride.This study analyzes the representations of multimodalities on the theoretical basis of Systemic Functional Grammar and Visual Grammar from a social semiotic perspective,and on the multimodal metaphors and metonymies from a cognitive perspective,discussing how to interpret the material on the condition of possessing social experience and world knowledge and knowing the discourse context,and trying to answers these questions:(1)What about the distribution of verbal and visual modalities in the video?(2)What metafunctions do verbal and visual modalities represent? How these semiotic sources interact with each other to construct meaning?(3)What multimodal metaphorical and metonymic phenomena are presented in the video?For seeking the answers,this study uses a qualitative and a quantitative method to analyze the video content.Specifically,it constructs a functional-cognitive analysis framework for the content analysis in which the researcher discusses the meaning representations in a “top-down” view,including analyzing the cultural context,generic feature,and situational context of this video,discussing multimodal meaning potentials from a functional-cognitive perspective and analyzing intersemiotics in different stages and episodes.For a more precise result,the annotation software ELAN is used to summarize the distribution of major semiotics.analyze the video content.The results show that(1)verbal and visual modalities both take a large proportion in occurrence,and they are all major modalities.Comparatively,verbal language is the most important resource in meaning construction,taking the largest ratio in number and duration.In visual communication,actional process is the most frequent resource kind in narrative structure,and analytical process is the relatively most occurred resource in conceptual structure;(2)verbal language meaning is mainly realized by different transitivity processes,modality system,theme-rheme information structure,and cohesion,and similarly visual semiotic meanings are embodied by narrative and conceptual processes,contact,shot distance,modality value,information value,salience and framing.The interrelationships of the two major modalities together with background music in the video are basiclly complementary and synergistic,they mutually construct the meaning,and(3)there are 16 multimodal metaphorical phenomena;some examples of multimodal metonymies are listed.The projections from different source domains to target domains are represented by verbal and visual modalities,describing the matter objectively and expressing the speaker’s emotions and attitudes toward from a cognitive point of view.In general,this video discourse’s integrated meaning is constructed in chronological order.The innovation of this study firstly lies in the talk show material chosen——it is firmly related to the frontier of China’s space technology development,which has the time characteristic;besides,the genre of the discourse is fresh,with a distinctive narrative style compared with traditional talk shows.Additionally,the study establishes an upgraded contextual analysis framework which involves functional grammar and cognitive metaphor model that might be applied as the reference to dynamic multimodal discourse analysis.Meanwhile,it can help discourse recipients grasp the ability of multiliteracy to some degrees.As for the social practical meaning,the value of this topical video could be revealed and amplified by this study——building an image of China’s space industry and increasing sense of national pride of Chinese people.