| The information technology has made a leap in the diversification of means of communication while the Department of Defense official websites of some countries have been improving and innovating all the time.However,the authoritative attributes and the effectiveness of value dissemination of these websites stay as the core.The United States DoD official website has just gone through its revision in October 2018,and become one of the most representative DoD websites in the international community.Issuing military news reports has always been one of the important functions of U.S.DoD website.These reports show a combined genre with news discourse,military discourse,institutional discourse and national defense discourse,with a multimodal-featured webpage as their carrier.The images in these reports contribute to the readers‘ participation in news reading with their significances as evidences,aesthetic appreciations and evaluations of the real world.However,at the same time,those images are also manipulating concepts and readers,so that the American values and ideologies can be acknolodged and accepted in the widest range.Based on the theories of functional linguistics and sociology of knowledge,this study focuses on the images constructing knowledge with their own and with other semiotic resources on the same webpage.In the analyzing process,multimodal analysis frameworks such as SF-MDA and Ge M,visual grammar,appraisal system,CDA and other tools are integrated with the influences of the cultural and situational context and image-text relationships.The images as the micro-level discourses and webpages as the macro-level discourses are analyzed respectively.The semantic meaning and evaluative meaning constructed by the images and webpages show a high correlation with the semantic gravity and evaluative gravity for knowledge building.So it is put forward that the metafunctions of language and images contribute to the semantic construction of the knowledge contents,and the text and image appraisal system contribute to the evaluative construction of the critical thinking of knowledge.The schema of semantic gravity and evaluative gravity for knowledge building can also be applied to the image constructing knowledge.This relationship bridges the gap between functional linguistics and sociology of knowledge.Thus a comprehensive analysis framework for image constructing knowledge is formed.The study adopts critical discourse analysis(CDA)to close-read the military news reports from the U.S.DoD website.The reports collected can be divided into two categories: images and webpages,with the images being further categorized into synthetic subject images,infographics,images of children and images of weapons and equipment.The first two are used for the discussion of re-contextualization impacting on image constructing knowledge,and the last two are used for the discussion of images‘role in semantic and evaluative meaning construction and knowledge construction.The webpages collected represents fours types of news pages: homepage,special report on long-term military operation,news reports with images as the nuclear,and news reports with mixed news forms.This dissertation discusses the semantic and evaluative meaning and knowledge construction of the images as news reports and the images in the news reports.And the influences from language hierarchies such as context,image type,image function and image-text relationship are carefully dealt with their influences on knowledge construction.In the course of the research,the images in U.S.DoD website military news reports are classified according to the research objects,with their functions in the news reports discussed.The relationship between the experience description and critical thinking in knowledge construction and those linguistic concepts as context,image type,image-text relationship and others are clarified.The schematic system of semantic gravity and evaluation gravity on discourse construction and knowledge construction shows similarities.And semantic waves and evaluative waves of knowledge construction can be realized in discourse constructions as well.This dissertation may further shed a light on the application value of real-world new media discourses in military English curriculum.And it may also influence online news discourse construction and knowledge construction,and corresponding field research in depth.There are also some other issues should be mentioned.The image abuse is inevitable even in the U.S.DoD website.And the images adopted are uniformed in a stereotyped view of America superiority.Through analyzing the appraisal system of the DoD news reports,the values and ideology embedding can be reveled,which may contribute to the building of both multi-literacy and media literacy.Those discourse strategies(textual and visual)applied to stimulate and retain the interests of the readers and the symantic and appraisal patterns and characteristics of the military news reports are solid evidences for the conmmunicating of American ideology and the legitimate power and social relationship constructed in the DoD news reports.This study has been flawed in not yet being able to collect the images and news reports in the U.S.DoD website with big data.It has not been able to interpret other types of news reports in the website,such as scientific and technological news reports,reports related to national military policies,etc.The evaluation procedures of different image-text discourses are based on different social purposes.The multi-layered construction of semantic meaning and semantic evaluation in multi-modal discourses,and the comprehensive realization of multi-modal knowledge construction are also worthy of further study. |
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