Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Chinese Poetry Of Landscape Painting "Ta Ge Tu"(《踏歌图》)

With the development of science and technology, invention and adoption ofmultimedia, information transfer is not only limited to language, but expands to othersorts of modes such as image, music, color, architecture, etc. Therefore it brings abouta new kind of discourse---multimodal discourse, in which meaning is expressed viatwo or more social semiotic modes. Aiming at overcoming the limitation of traditionaldiscourse analysis and emphasizing on integration of various semiotic modes in a text,during the last century researchers put forward a new form of discourseanalysis---Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) which develops from Halliday’ssystemic-functional grammar. Soon afterwards more and more researchers areengaged in this field and great achievements have been obtained. Ancient Chinesetypical discourse, Poetry of landscape paintings, is a classical embodiment ofcombining art of poems and pictures. It belongs to multimodal discourse whichincludes visual and verbal modes. However, the application of MDA to poetry oflandscape paintings is rarely seen. The thesis attempts to have a multimodal discourseanalysis of one master work of poetry of landscape paintings---Ma Yuan’s “Ta GeTu”.The thesis adopts qualitative approach to analyze Ma Yuan’s “Ta Ge Tu” byusing MDA theories within the framework of systemic functional grammar. First,based on Halliday’s three meta-functions and Kress and van Leeween’s visualgrammar, it respectively has a specific analysis of the poem and image on the paintingto find out how the two semiotic modes realize three meta-functions and what theirfunctions in objective text. Then, it studies relationship between visual and verbalmode within Royce’s inter-semiotic complementarity to find out how the twomodalities cooperate with each other to make integrative meaning of the poetry oflandscape paintings.“Ta Ge Tu” is a typical poetry of landscape paintings. Throughcomprehensive and thorough analysis, the study comes to the following findings:representational meaning of this kind of multimodal discourse adopts combination ofaction process and reaction process vividly to show us a special historical matter.Meanwhile it cannot do without circumstance setting which shows when, where, howthe things happen. It offers information and reveals public social distance so that readers can evaluate it objectively. What’s more, representative characters are salientin the painting. Secondly, visual and verbal modes construe discourse meaning viameaning, structure, color and layout. The visual and modal modes have the samespeech function. In “Ta Ge Tu”, concerning ideational meaning image elaborates themeaning of words; in turn the words extend the meaning of image by providingbackground information. As a result the whole meaning of the discourse is enhancedand deepened. Moreover the visual and verbal modes posses same speech function:offer information. And the words make the interpersonal relationship more clear.Usually the layout of poetry of landscape paintings is consistent: words put on theupper part while image below it, which is in accord with reading path as well asinformation value of compositional rules. The last finding of the thesis is poetry oflandscape painting is one kind of Chinese culture. So the semiotic meaning of suchkind of multimodal discourse is definitely ‘culturally bound’. Therefore, Chineseculture and history should be taken into account when discussion is analyzed.From above, it can be seen the study has a certain significance which includesscientific and practical ones. Application MDA theories in a new field, interpretingpoetry of landscape painting can testify the applicability and feasibility of MDA. Inaddition, studying dimension of ancient Chinese poetry of landscape is enriched andthe researches also help appreciators objectively and comprehensively understand thetext.