Multimodality Discourse Analysis On Time Magazine Covers With PRC Leader Images

Multimodality Discourse Analysis (MDA):“the term multimodality, as used here,is a technical one aiming to highlight that the meaning work we do at all times exploitsvarious semiotics”(Idema2003:39). Therefore, MDA is Discourse Analysis based onMultimodality. Just as Kress says:“Most (mainstream) linguistic theories separatemeaning and form--syntax being the study of form; semantics being the study ofmeaning; pragmatics being the study of use. Multimodal Social Semiotics deals withentities in which meaning and form appear as an integrated whole, a sign.”(Kress2010:61) Following technology development, especially the latest development ofinformation technology (IT), people are able to express their meaning by employingmore modalities. Meanwhile, people realized that to understand meanings dose not justdepend on the verbal form alone but on full modalities, which are abundant around us.This thesis aims to investigate the writing and visual resources in front covers of Timemagazine with accepting the theoretical framework of appraisal systems, visualgrammar, etc. Through studying the patterns of the western media covers, we canidentify what kind of ideology the magazine holds and supports for, and what ways theideology is composed with writing and image modalities.The main theoretical frameworks of this thesis are Multimodality DiscourseAnalysis (MDA), Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), and Positive Discourse Analysis(PDA). But the direct theoretical frameworks are Visual Grammar, and Appraisal theory.The layout of the practical work of Chapter four in this thesis adapts the arrangement ofvan Leeuwen’s The Visual Representation of Social Actor.(Leeuwen2008)Multimodality study is based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) andset within the theoretical framework of ‘social semiotics’.‘Society’ is the core and bondof the three theoretical frameworks, that is, Just due to ‘Society’, MDA, CDA and PDAbecome an intrinsic whole. The approaches of the present study are combined methodswith a quantitative statistics and a qualitative one. In the quantitative study, it means this thesis collects all the images of China’s leaders since the foundation of the PRC, andsets up the caption collection. After then, statistics analysis is employed. In thequalitative study, after selecting the images of Chinese leaders, according to the twodifferent periods divided by the watershed1979, this thesis divides the images into twocategories. Category one is Chairman Mao Period, and the other one, category two, isReform Period. The results show that, the two periods have significant difference inboth writing meaning and image meaning.This thesis analyzes image and writing all around, that is, the three parts,Representational, Interactive and Compositional are of Visual Grammar, and the threeparts, Engagement, Attitude and Graduation are of Appraisal theory. Moreover, thisthesis has a try on the relationship between writing and image in a quite new viewpoint.It finds out there are three relationship among them, that is, Scattered, Homo-signified,and Loose-related. In all this collection, about half of Covers belong to Homo-signifiedrelationship, but quite few to the scattered relationship. However, the Scattered candraw more atttraction from viewers for their unique setup style. On Depicting people,this thesis discovers that, ideology has somehow diachronic or historical nature:something used to be discriminated or prejudiced once would turn to be acceptable andapproved by time changes.