A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of BBC Documentary Series A Perfect Planet From The Perspective Of Systemic Functional Grammar And Visual Grammar

In recent years,with the development of multimedia technology,semiotic resources such as images,sounds and animations have participated in people’s daily communication.More and more scholars have shifted from traditional language text analysis to multimodal discourse analysis and conducted their research on many fields,such as advertising,film and speech.However,few studies have been found on nature documentaries.In a contemporary society where ecological and environmental problems are becoming increasingly severe,it is vital to analyze nature documentaries from a multimodal perspective to raise viewers’ awareness of environmental protection.Therefore,this study conducts a multimodal discourse analysis of the BBC documentary series A Perfect Planet,aiming to answer the following questions:(1)what language resources are used to realize ideational,interpersonal and textual function in A Perfect Planet;(2)what visual resources are used to realize representational,interactive and compositional meaning in A Perfect Planet;and(3)how are language and visual modalities integrated to construct ecological meaning in A Perfect Planet.This study employs a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods.In the study of language modality,with the help of UAM Corpus Tool6 and Ant Conc 3.5.9,a corpus named “APP” was built,annotated and analyzed based on Halliday’s systemic functional grammar.In the study of visual modality,this study intercepted 23 representative images from the documentary and analyzed them based on Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar.Furthermore,this study analyzed the relations between different modalities in the documentary.The main findings of the study are as follows:(1)In terms of language modality,the documentary focuses on the main participants,such as animals,humans,and ecological resources on the earth.It mainly shows the life of various species and the relationship among human beings,other organisms and the natural environment through the material(70.16%),mental(13.49%)and relational processes(12.70%),and declarative mood(93.2%)in the mood system.Meanwhile,more low-value modal words are used to close the distance with the audience to convey the ecological view of equality between human beings and nature.(2)In terms of visual modality,the representational meaning mainly demonstrates the environment and human behaviors to the audience through narrative and conceptual processes.The interactive meaning enhances the interaction with the audience through contact and social distance and strengthens the image of natural participants through horizontal perspective and high-modality images.The compositional meaning is to guide the audience’s attention and help them obtain essential information,thus enhancing their understanding of the meaning of the documentary.(3)In terms of the relations between modalities.The language modality and visual modality in the documentary are mainly complementary.They strengthen the construction of meaning through intensifying relations and complement each other with information through non-intensifying relations.In addition,the auditory modality has its unique significance in meaning construction,reflected explicitly in the context interaction in non-complementary relations.This study is expected to provide implications for those scholars who will study meaning construction in documentaries from a multimodal perspective,and to offer readers a new perspective on the appreciation of documentaries.