Development Of Multimodal Discourse Analysis

In recent half century, systemic-functional linguistics has obtained rapid development and been widely and extensively applied to various practices at home and abroad. In recent years, systemic-functional linguistics has become an important force in modern linguistics. The traditional research object of systemic-functional grammar is purely textual materials. With the social development, researchers begin to switch their attentions to multimodal texts—non-textual discourse. Based on this situation, researchers put forward a new type of research theory and approach—Multimodal Discourse Analysis. More and more researchers at home and abroad begin to focus on studies on Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Great deals of achievements have been made in the linguistic field and foreign language teaching field. Researchers in this field output a lot of excellent academic achievements. Currently, an Italian linguist, Baldry, combines corpus linguistics with Multimodal Discourse Analysis and puts forward a interdiscipline—multimodal corpus linguistics. He combines linguistic theories, including Systemic-Functional Grammar and Multimodal Discourse Analysis theory, with digital technology and conducts a research on film text analysis, which becomes an important trend in the systemic-functional linguistics and multimodal text analysis filed.Under this background, this thesis attempts to study the following two questions: 1) Observe and outline the development path of Multimodal Discourse Analysis and summarize its hidden rule and development trend, with emphasizing on the introduction of Baldry's multimodal corpus-based approach to film text analysis; 2) Review the previous research within the same period conducted by researchers at home, observe the achievements they have made on Multimodal Discourse Analysis, and conduct a comparative studies of the differences and similarities between the researches on Multimodal Discourse Analysis at home and abroad from three perspectives: linguistic theory, digital technology and application.Through the present research, this thesis concludes two important points: 1) The significant trend for the development of systemic-functional linguistics and Multimodal Discourse Analysis is the combination with computer linguistics, including corpus linguistics; 2) By comparison, researchers at home stress much on application of Multimodal Discourse Analysis to theoretical studies, classroom teaching and translation while researchers at abroad have the edge of introducing computer technologies to linguistic studies.With the appearance of multimodal texts, especially film texts, the present research helps researchers conduct studies from the perspective of corpus linguistics. Film texts have the characteristics of common multimodal texts—multimodality. Besides, film texts are dynamic. For example, a shot extends slowly at a certain speed displaying various semantic resources. In addition, film texts are interactive. For example, in a radio broadcast program, the host interacts with the audience. For researchers at home, the concept of"film text"is still new. The related introduction is beyond the nature of the"film text"itself to let alone a deep exploration into its research approach. Therefore, the present research helps promote the communications between the researchers at home and abroad.