Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Interpersonal Meaning—Making Of Personal Webpages

Inheriting Halliday’s social semiotic perspective and applying the theory of three metafunctions from the systemic functional linguistics, Kress and van Leeuwen set up the grammar of visual design for the analysis of images, which has facilitated the emergence and thriving of the new discipline within Discourse Analysis-Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Multimodal Discourse Analysis goes beyond verbal language and focuses on multiple semiotic resources. The last few years see a fast development of theories in this field and yearly increase of published studies. This flourish is in conformity with the current tendency of more applications of multimodality and tighter integration of multiple modes.The Internet has been an essential part of people’s life since its invention and prevalence during the last decade. Personal webpage becomes a new platform for communication. Thanks to computational technologies and the Internet, webpages has a great advantage in multimodality because it can integrate multiple modes such as texts, images, and videos etc. to achieve certain function. Among webpages, there are more and more personal webpages for communication and microblog is the newest popular platform.Treating personal webpages as a multimodal discourse and choosing the English version of Tencent microblog homepage as the study case, this thesis applies the GeM model set up by John Bateman to break down the homepage systematically into elements on four layers-base layer, layout layer, rhetorical layer and navigational layer. By analyzing the elements on these layers, this thesis intends to find out how interpersonal meanings are realized by the combination of multiple modes in the three aspects:interaction between the webpage and its user, modality of the webpage and the matching between layout and rhetorical relations of the webpage:Firstly, interactions which are realized through semiotic resources construct certain relationship between the webpage and the user. The Tencent microblog homepage has applied buttons and texts etc. to build relations of instruction and assistance.Secondly, the Tencent microblog homepage uses texts, lines, frames icons, and semiotics resources of intermediate modality, to construct the medium modality of the homepage, which, besides fulfilling the basic function as microblogging, helps to assure some attractiveness.Furthermore, the homepage is generally valid in matching the layout to its rhetorical relations. The layout structure successfully reflects the nuclear position of the major function of the homepage as well as the relations constructed on the homepage.