A Study On The Coherence Of Multimodal Textual Cohesion Based On Discourse "Constructing Cohesive Mechanism"

Cohesion and coherence are the most important concepts in the study of discourse analysis. A lot work has been done on the analysis of textual coherence, while few investigations have been conducted on dynamic discourse analysis. This thesis selects a public service advertisement as its research subject, and analyzes the dynamic discourse from multimodal cohesion and coherence perspective. After a review of the previous studies on multimodal text cohesion, this thesis analyze Kress and van Leeuwen’s VG and summarizes a multimodal coherence mechanisms, named “compositional coherence mechanisms” to analyze the cohesion relations which exist in multimodal public service ads, and then analyzes visual and verbal modes in public service advertisements, aiming at finding how the visual and verbal semiotics construe meaning and how different social semiotic modes cooperate to produce synergistic effect in influencing the viewers.This thesis adopts qualitative research method to analyze to selected material. Firstly, this thesis uses Thibault and Baldry’s multimodal transcription framework for reference to do a descriptive analysis of the research subject. Then it provides one exemplar of the transcription template, which lays a foundation for discourse coherence analysis. Secondly, through the analysis of “compositional coherence mechanisms”, this study investigates how multimodal “compositional coherence mechanisms” contributes to multimodal coherence. The contribution of the composition to the effect of multimodal cohesion is analyzed with the help of “compositional coherence mechanisms”---information value, salience and framing, from two aspects, which is representational level and interactional level. To verify the applicability and validity of “compositional coherence mechanisms” this study analyzed a public service advertisement. At last, on the context plane, this paper tries to analysis the selected public service advertisement to find out the cultural implication of the semiotic resources.As for the significant of the research, it explored the method for dynamic discourse analysis and verified the transcription method, and at the same time provides a new perspective for cohesion and coherence study.