Corpus-based Muitimodal Critical Discourse Analysis

The concept of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) was first putforward by David Machin and Andrea Mayr in their monograph published in2012.MCDA is the further development of CDA, and it believes that images, photographs,diagrams and graphics also work to create meaning. The job of MCDA is to reveal thekinds of power interests buried in the images as well as the texts. Traditional CDAresearches mainly focus on discourses in the fields of mass media, political speech,economics, institutions, etc. Taking the language and texts as the objects, it aims toanalyze how writers and speakers create meaning by utilizing linguistic andgrammatical methods. Also, it persuades people to think about events in the specialways, and sometimes it even manipulates and controls readers’ and listeners’ thoughtsand behaviors under the premise of concealing the real communicative intentions.Website discourse is one kind of new media discourses born from the developmentof computer technology and network technology. The website discourse issued by oneauthority has the properties of institutional discourses, which is called websiteinstitutional discourse (WID). Compared with traditional textual institutional discourse,WID has both modal functions of texts and images. MCDA holds that images are alsodiscourses like texts and reflect the ideologies as well. Therefore, the multimodality ofWID must be different from the traditional monomodal discourse (written text andspoken language) in the ways, approaches and degrees of the realization of discoursefunctions. In order to verify the above hypothesis, the current study accepts Halliday’sSystemic Functional Grammar and Kress&van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar, appliesMachin&Mayr’s analytical methods and tools of MCDA, chooses the websiteinstitutional discourse as the case, and aims to answer the following three researchquestions:1) Which modes do the website institutional discourses present? And whatare the features?2) How do the website institutional discourses build the socialrelations of constructing and being constructed between the represented participants andwebsite viewers by multimodal means?3) How does the combined use of visual imagesand language realize the manipulation and control of the website viewers’ thoughts andbehaviors? The current study chooses the British NHS foundation trust websites as the datasource, and constructs a small-scale corpus, referred to as Foundation Trust WebsiteCorpus (FTWC), by collecting texts from all the147foundation trust websites. By themeans of quantitative and qualitative methods, the analysis is divided into two stages:linguistic analysis stage and visual analysis stage. The linguistic analysis is carried outwith the corpus analytical software Antconc3.2.4. In macro level wordlist andconcordance of FTWC are discussed, and in micro level lexical choice, nominalizationand transitivity of FTWC are analyzed. The visual analysis is conducted through casestudies with the analytical tools of MCDA, such as settings, salience, poses, distance,angle, etc. The case studies include visual semiotic choices, visual representationalstrategies and visual representation of transitivity.The research results show three main points. Firstly, WID presents both texts andvisual images, and has the features of multimodality and social functions, such ascommercialization and privatization. Compared with traditional textual institutionaldiscourse, WID can further reveal the power owned by the institutions. Secondly, WIDsuccessfully builds the social relations between the represented participants and websiteviewers by multimodal means. Taking the NHS foundation trust websites as theexample, the participants, namely the managers of medical institutions, utilize firstperson, commendatory words and images which show the excellent environment andservice with high frequency. In this way they can construct strong power for themselves.On the contrary, the changes in the national health system, such as privatization,declining service quality and for-profit purpose, are all concealed behind the websites.In this way the website viewers, namely the patients and their family members, areconstructed with weak power. Thirdly, the combined analysis of language phenomenonand multimodality through transitivity can reveal the underlying ideologies whichmanipulate and control website viewers’ thoughts and behaviors.This study verifies the hypothesis, and gives website viewers some enlightenmentto improve their discriminability of and sensitivity to WID while browsing websites ofinstitutions. Meanwhile to some extent it will broaden the research perspective of CDAand enrich the research field involved in the combination of MCDA with the methodsof Corpus Linguistics.