| As a fashion and popular art, movie is deeply loved by all walks of life. Movie posters are born with movie and composed of painting, photography, text and other means of visual art. Its picture is very clear and vivid and can accurately express the movie's artistic aspirations and thought connotations. Meanwhile, the poster is the product of the times and social environment, reflecting the values and characteristics of the society in a certain historical period and also reflecting different national identity and ethnic cultures in different countries.Multimodal discourse refers to the discourse compounded by image, chart and so on besides text, and also can be defined as meaningful text that contains more than one symbolic coding (li 2003). In multimodal discourse analysis, image, sound, color and layout just as language are all resources of meanings and play an extremely important role in constructing meanings. Therefore, image, sound, color, layout and other semiotic resources should be placed at equally important position as language.This research analyzes Chinese and American love story movie posters from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis. According to Lim's Integrative Multisemiotic Model, this thesis launches the analysis and the research from three planes: expression, content and context. In expression plane, the expression form of language and image in Chinese and American love story movie posters is analyzed. Through analyzing, the paper sums up two differences: Firstly, Chinese love story movie posters pay great emphasis on visual sense, while American love story movie posters pay more attention to the combination of the parts to the whole picture. Secondly, there are also differences in techniques of expression that Chinese love story movie posters are impressionistic-oriented but American love story movie posters are realistic-oriented. In content plane, the theory of appraisal and visual grammar are borrowed to discuss how these two modalities carry out meanings and what differences are between Chinese and American love story movie posters. The findings are listed as follows:a. Chinese love story movie posters pay more attention to the information of directors and actors, while American love story movie posters often attach importance to the information of producers and publishers and have high awareness for protection of the intellectual property rights.b. In selling points, Chinese love story movie posters emphasize the effect of star, but American love story movie posters lay stress on the plot of movies.c. Under the visual grammar framework, the present study have found that"demand"images take major percentage in Chinese love story movie posters and social relation is often established, while"offer"images are more common in American love story movie posters and intimate relation is often established.Additionally, the rationale of these differences between the two countries'love story movie posters is explored from the context plane. The underling reasons are summarized from the following three aspects:a. Different situation of movie industries and different institutional mechanisms impacts the development of movie in two countries.b. Different culture and values lead to different views on love and marriage and also different aesthetic attitudes.c. Different target audiences affect the different tendencies of poster's designing.The significance of this research is to find out how the text and language modalities realize meanings and it is hoped that this could be helpful in informing readers of the meaning-making process of these semiotic resources and improving readers'multimodal discourse literacy. The analysis on the culture, economic situation and institutional mechanism has a profound interpretation of the context meaning of love story movie posters. Finally, it can give some hints on the designing of more persuasive love story movie posters and expanding the publicity of movies. |
PDF Full Text Request