"United,We Can":A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Documentary Voices From The Frontline:China’s War On Poverty

The documentary Voices from the Frontline: China’s War on Poverty,on a global scale,has attracted worldwide attention to China’s poverty alleviation,and has acted as an important channel for telling the world the story of China’s poverty alleviation.As the important modes for communication,the commentary,character voice-over and images make the documentary a multimodal discourse with characteristic features.Drawing on the views from System Functional Grammar,Visual Grammar,and Multimodal Synergy,the study elaborates the meaning construction by the ideational function of employed semiotic resources in this documentary,including verbal and visual representations and the multimodal interrelation of them.Results show that in the ideational function manifestation,China’s endeavor of poverty alleviation is presented as a joint effort by the whole nation,i.e.the backing of the Chinese central government and the cooperation of broad social sectors.Specifically,in the verbal representation,material process,relational process and mental process make the cornerstones of the ideational kind of meaning construction in the transitivity system,while existential process,verbal process and behavioural process act in a subsidiary position.In the visual representation,all process types are vital to the meaning construction.The narrative process serves as the dynamic representation of every social involvement,including the Chinese central government,officials from all levels,the poor people,the enterprise,and the third-party evaluation team.The conceptual process acts as a reinforcement to the topics represented by narrative structures,and gives supplement explanations,like the representation of living conditions,natural scenery,and symbolic meaning of images.The interrelation of verbal mode and visual mode is in a complementary type.They are mutually reinforced and coordinating in synergy to ensure an adequate meaning construction.By detailed analysis of the documentary themed China’s story of poverty alleviation,this study offers implications on enriching the research subjects of multimodal discourse analysis,so that more discourses with Chinese characters can be included.It also helps to advance people’s multimodal literacy about the knowledge of semiotic resources in documentary discourse and the ways the resources constructing meaning.