Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of News Text

As one of the mass discourses, news text is an important way for people to obtainpreviously unknown information and understand the occurrence all over the world, therefore,it has always been favored by linguists, especially discourse analysts. After the coming of themultimedia era, news text is no longer limited to a single text, but contains many multimodalcommunication resources, such as images, color, sound and so on. These social semiotics areadded into news texts, enriching the forms of meaning expressions and manifesting thediversity of communicative ways. In the previous study of news text, however, scholarsusually take the language system itself or discourse structure as their research object, butignore the visual meanings and functions. Therefore, by the1990s some western scholarshave tried to overcome this limitation and expand the research to images and sound. Amongthem, the most outstanding representatives are Kress and Van Leeuwen, who proposed visualgrammar for multimodal discourse analysis on the basis of systemic functional grammar.Under the guidance of systemic functional grammar, visual grammar and inter-semioticcomplementarity framework, the present study attempts to make a quantitative and qualitativeresearch of "One in a Billion", an Explanatory Reporting in the2011Pulitzer Prize. Firstly,this thesis analyzes the words from the selected material by using systemic functionalgrammar from the perspective of ideational, interpersonal and textual function; secondly, itmakes an analysis of the images from the data in terms of visual grammar from theperspective of representational, interactive and compositional meaning; and thirdly, byrepresenting the meanings of words and images separately, this study attempts to explore away to achieve the comprehensive meaning by using two modalities in the same context.The research finds that image, as well as words, can express meanings and reflect socialreality, besides, it can interact with the viewers; the difference between word and image is thatthe latter constructs its meaning mainly by semiotics and photography technique; constructingmeanings of images and words are complementary rather than separated from each other.The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter briefly introduces thebackground, research questions, purpose and significance, data collection, researchmethodology, and the organization of this study. Chapter two reviews the previous studies onnews text and multimodal discourse analysis both at home and abroad. Chapter three proposesan analytical model for the multimodal discourse analysis of news text under the frameworkof systemic functional grammar, visual grammar and inter-semiotic complementarity. Chapter four deals with the quantitative and qualitative analyses of a case study to testify theapplicability of the analytical model proposed in chapter three. Chapter five summarizes thefull content of this research, provides the findings of this research based on the researchquestions raised in chapter one and points out the limitations, and gives suggestions forfurther studies.