Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Medical Popular Science Cartoons In The Context Of Healthy China

In October 2019,the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and The State Council issued the Healthy China Action Plan(2019-2030).Article 1 of Item 15 clearly pointed out that: to do a good job in popularizing health science and improve the health literacy of the whole people are the most fundamental,economical and effective measures to improve the health level of a large population.Factors such as the transformation of social population structure and the change of residents’ living habits make chronic and serious diseases show an increasing trend.If these diseases are detected early and timely,the prognosis effect is usually good,and there is even a possibility of cure.The key is to strengthen residents’ health awareness and improve their ability to judge their own health level.At present,the content of health science is small in quantity and of low quality,and the main disseminators are mainly Grade-A public hospitals.Their advantage is that they have huge medical resources to provide an endless supply of popular science materials.However,they are often unable to start in the face of massive content materials,and their understanding of content construction remains in the copying and pasting of authoritative knowledge,lacking of interesting interpretation and expression of content.Based on the policy requirements and practical needs,this study analyzes the current medical knowledge popularization we-media "Mixed Knowledge",hoping to gain insight into its content construction strategy and provide a feasible content construction scheme for medical institutions and individuals who want to engage in health communication.Based on the two complete theories of systemic functional linguistics and new visual grammar,this paper uses text analysis and case analysis method to make a multimodal discourse analysis of the commentary and pictures of medical science cartoon in "Mixed Knowledge".It is found that in terms of text,Mixed Knowledge medical science cartoon tends to shape positive text content.Meanwhile,in the text,the expression logic of the first person and the third person interaction is adopted to describe the characteristics of diseases/viruses/bacteria/cells.At the same time,at the level of discourse cohesion,the author also uses pronoun selection to narrow the distance between the author and the reader.In terms of images,Mixed Knowledge interprets elite discourse in a playful manner with grassroots IP.The cartoon characters are mostly depicted by complex stick figures,and interpersonal relationships are built with readers through the eye vector of the characters.At the same time,the cartoon characters are reasonably combined with the real existence,making full use of readers’ associations and reducing the possibility of misreading information.Based on the above results,this paper proposes several enlightenments for the construction of future medical science comics:(1)Account IP: serious grassroots image(2)Plot characters: two-way personification outline(3)Discourse interpretation: deliberately narrowing psychological distance(4)breaking through dimension: boldly grafting common memory(5)Creating atmosphere: color ornament under the black and white framework.