| Public legal education is a part of legal discourse and falls within the research ofscope of forensic linguistics. As the development of new media, the means of publiclegal education is not limited to leaflets, pamphlets, posters and bulletin boards, whichare mono-modal but have changed to animations. In other words, new media, such asblogs and micro-blogs, has begun to be used to transmit legal information to thegeneral public rather than only relying on medium of paper and the modes of verballanguage. Not just individual legal practitioners but also institutions of lawenforcement, for instance, public security organs have begun to make use of this newmedia. Hence, various modes and modalities, not only speech and language, are beingused in the public legal discourse. These modes and modalities work together toconvey legal information to the general public. Hence, it is trend and urgent task tomake an extensive and thorough research on the legal public discourse.Multimodal discourse analysis is one development of Systemic Functional theory.It holds the view that other modes or modalities, such as image, sound, music, gesture,are the same as language with meaning potential. Since it·s born in1990s, it has beenapplied to various fields, ranging from advertisement, film to news.Through examining a series of newly produced anti-fraud animations, based onSystemic Functional Linguistics and Visual Grammar, we conduct the presentresearch to investigate the construal of meaning of public legal education discourseand based on the framework put forward by Radan Martinec, we conduct the relationsbetween image and text, with the overall objective of finding whether new mediamultimodal public legal education discourse is effective to transmit legal knowledge.Meanwhile, we also want to make some suggestions about how to use the multimodalresources more effectively to make better animations.The analysis reveals that:(1) For ideational meaning construal, in theseanti-fraud animations, image put more emphasis on the facial expression and gestureand it also gives more detailed introduction to the participants, circumstances and important clues visually and vividly while text gives more detailed information aboutthe fraudulent tricks, including how fraudsters set traps and how they persuadevictims successfully.(2) For interpersonal meaning construal, various image and text resources are used tocreate the interaction with potential viewers. They collaborate together to offerinformation to viewers and create a social distance to transmit information objectively.Besides, producers also show their negative attitude through the depiction ofrepresented participants and accompanying words they say.(3) With regard to the relations between image and text, we find that independent andsubordinate are two major relations from the perspective of status and extension ismajor relation from the perspective of logico-semantic with regard to ideationalmeaning. These relations show that producers use image or text independently andextended one by the other in order to make viewers receive more detailed informationsuch as fraudulent materials, fraudulent tricks and so on. In terms of interpersonalmeaning, text and image is congruent from logico-semantic relation. With regard tostatus, three dimensions bear their differences. Image and text are mainly independentin speech and image act, complementary in social distance and subordinate in attitude.(4) It is also found that this new form of public legal education can achieve bettereffects compared with traditional ones but they still need to be improved in the future.For example, producers should apply the relations between image and text skilfullyand the production should be improved.This thesis extends the studies of SFL and VG to the multimodal discourseanalysis of public legal education. It is expected to deepen the understanding of publiclegal education discourse, which deserves much more academic attention. It willbenefit both the general public and producers. |
