Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Interactive Meaning In Film Discourse

With the advent of information technology, language is no longer the only source of meaning. Various social semiotics such as gestures, images, music and three dimensional motion images are more frequently incorporated into social practices of meaning construal. Multimodality becomes increasingly popular in people's daily life, which ends the domination of language over other types of modalities. The traditional discourse analysis which concentrates on linguistic discourses has been found limited in explaining the meaning construal of multimodal discourses, which presses for a new grammar for multimodal discourses. It is against this background that Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) arises as a new trend of discourse analysis. Among the many schools of multimodal discourse analysis, the social semiotic approach to Multimodal Discourse Analysis which began in the 1990s proves to be the most developed one.Based on Halliday's Systemic-Functional Linguistics (1978,2000 and 2001), social semiotic approach to Multimodal Discourse Analysis attempts to extend functional grammar into the analysis of discourses involving multiple modalities such as the visual, the audio, the three dimensional objects and so on. Yet so far as it is concerned, multimodal discourse analysis is still at its initial stage, with most studies concentrating on static images, while other types of modalities are inadequately touched upon. In terms of this consideration, this thesis chooses dynamic film discourse as the analyzing objects in order to explore the construction of interactive meaning in dynamic multimodal discourses.Film analysis from the linguistic perspective began with Metz's film theories that leaned heavily on de Saussure's structuralism. However, Metz (1974) ultimately denied the feasibility of rooting film analysis within a linguistic framework. By taking the social semiotic stance, the present thesis holds that all types of modalities like visual images and sound are social semiotics with the three meta-functions just like language; therefore, theoretically speaking, linguistic theories are applicable to the analysis of film discourse. Practically speaking, the applicability of linguistic theories into other types of modalities has been proved by recent studies of MDA.Given the above considerations, the present thesis, from the perspective of social semiotics, constructs an interactive multimodal discourse analysis framework based on Halliday's Systemic-functional linguistics, Kress and van Leeuwen's Visual Grammar and by drawing upon Appraisal Theory. The proposed framework is used to analyze the interactive meaning of film discourse by adopting primarily a qualitative approach with the help of a quantitative research method. In accordance with Kay L. O'Halloran's (2004) segmentation method of film discourse, this thesis takes shot as the basic unit of analysis and explores in detail how images are used dynamically to realize the interactive meaning and how the visual modality and the verbal modality contribute to the integrative interactive meaning separately and cooperatively.The analysis results indicate that:first, dynamic discourses provide various means to shift among the choices in a resource system, presenting a successive and dynamic representation of the interactive relation between the represented participants as well as between the represented participants and the interactive participants; Second, the interactive meaning expressed by one resource system could be reinforced or complemented by the other resource systems; and new meanings could arise from the combination of seemingly contradicting choices in different resource systems. Third, the interaction between the verbal resource system and the visual resource system is not a simple relation of consonance or dissonance. The resource systems in the two kinds of modalities interact with each other in a complicated complementary way to reinforce the same aspect from different perspectives or interact in a contradictory way to express the contradictory between the inner world of the represented participants and the world of reality in and out of the film.To some degree, the present study has made certain contribution to enriching Multimodal Discourse Analysis theoretically through constructing an integrative verbal-visual intersemiotic framework for interactive meaning analysis, which further provides convenience in exploring the interactive mechanism between the visual image and the verbal language in a more direct and clearer way. Moreover, by elaborating in detail the realization of interactive meanings in a dynamic film environment, the present thesis steps beyond the limitation of Visual Grammar which focuses primarily on static images. Practically, this thesis provides a new perspective for people to recognize the hidden ideology in the film discourse. Yet, during the process of analysis, this thesis also discovers the limitations of the current study (for instance, the present thesis concentrates on the visual and verbal modalities and one component "tone" of the audio modality, while leaving untouched the other aspects of the audio modality like music) and proposes some suggestions for further research.