MDA On TV Drama Program

Since American linguist Harris put forward a new theory of discourse analysis in the early fifties of the 20th century, the researchers around the world have made great efforts to develop a variety of related theories and methods. However, mostly taking the English language as the subject of study, the researchers only pay their attention to the language system, the semantic structure and the relations between social culture and psychological cognition while ignore other non-verbal recourses such as image, color and sound, which causes the limitations in the study of discourse analysis. The Multimodal discourse analysis (here after MDA) emerged in the 1990s could overcome these limitations to a great extent.Multimodal discourse analysis refers to the new forms of text in which words, typography, sound, pictures and other semiotic resources are woven together to make meaning.MAD has been decisively influenced by Halliday's social semiotic theory. Halliday(1978,1985,1994) holds that language is a semiotic mode and any semiotic mode has to represent three communicative broad metafunctions, namely the ideational function, the interpersonal function and the textual function. Kress & Van Leeuwen's Visual Grammar (1996) is a landmark in MDA, since then, many great studies have been made in this area both theoretically and practically. Kress & Van Leeuwen's Reading Images (1996) based on SFL which established the framework of MDA on image analysis, mainly analyzed the image analysis's function in discourse and treated the way in which the visual pattern are formed by characters, places and things, then finally the realization of its representational, interactive and compositional meaning. The TV drama program discourse analysis touches upon the semiotic discussion of image, color, sound and other non-verbal recourses.Therefore, taking the old TV drama program A Dream of Red Mansions as the case study, the present study tries to discuss the utility of MDAfrom the meaning of image including representation, interactive and compositional meaning, the meaning of color including the three metafunctions and the meaning of soundtrack. Through the comparative study between the old and new version of TV drama program A Dream of Red Mansions, the present study aims to answer the question that what type of discourse can be best presented with what type of modes (Zhang Delu,2009).