A Social Semiotic Approach To Multimodal News Reports On Hillary Clinton’s Visit To Africa

American Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton launched an11-day tour across Africa from July31,2012, which was reported at full length by American news media. This tour aimed to enhance America’s influence in Africa and tried to compete with China in the economic area according to the newspaper Guardian published on August1.This thesis aims to find out how American media’s reports help to raise America’s influence and limit China’s competitiveness by analyzing the written texts of3related news reports from some main American newspapers. Meanwhile, it also tries to reach an understanding of the visual texts, a significant way of communication in public domain. The textual analysis is made under Fairclough’s three-dimensional model aided by the analytical tools in Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). The visual texts in the reports are analyzed by applying Kress&van Leeuwen’s model of sign-making grammar (1998). This thesis also tries to find out how the visual text and written text coordinate together to express the theme of the reports.It is hoped that the present study will be of help for readers to raise their sensitivity of the connotative ideology in the news reports by foreign media. The study also provides evidence that social semiotic analysis is a powerful tool that can be adopted in the research of the language and image, and Fairclough’s three-dimensional model can be extensively applied.