Multimodal Genre Analysis Of Movie Trailers

Genre analysis, which mainly focuses on the linguistic, rhetorical and generic structures, has been applied in analysis for various genres of texts. Similarly, with the popularity of the multimodal texts, the research of multimodal discourse analysis has covered many areas:the images, visual design, the displayed art, paintings, architecture and films. However, few, if any, of the academic attention has been paid on the study of movie trailers from the integrative perspective combining the genre analysis and multimodal discourse analysis. And this is the focus of the present study. The present study is going to examine the structures (especially the genre structure) of the Chinese and English movie trailers and the use of multimodes in different generic stages. These trailers will be also compared and contrast in terms of their stages and the orders of the stages.The research takes an interdisciplinary integrative qualitative research approach. The analysis of trailers draws on the theory from linguistics and film study. Bateman’s (2008) and Maier’s (2011) theory are integrated to analyze the structures of the film trailers.The research findings show that the Chinese and English movie trailers share many similarities in terms of the genre structure except some minor differences. This finding conforms to the key feature of genre-the communicative purposes and functions define the genre and the genre various in the actual use. Secondly, all the stages in Maier’s framework (prologue, orientation, complication, evaluation, promotional recapitulation, promotional interpretation, promotional identification, promotional recommendation and promotional information) have appeared in the trailers, with evaluation and promotional recommendation appearing much less than other stages. And the orientation, complication, promotional recapitulation, promotional interpretation, promotional identification, promotional information are obligatory stages. Thirdly, the author uncovers a new stage which is not included in Maier’s framework and the author names it "promotional elicitation". This stage is an explicit obligatory stage. It is also found that there are two minor differences between Chinese and English movie trailers-English movie trailers introduce the release date twice with Chinese trailers introducing only once and English movie trailers voice-overs have both verbal and aural mode with Chinese trailers only having verbal mode. There are more findings about the use of multimodes in different stages, the structure of other levels of trailers and the impacts of constraints (the canvas constraints, production and consumption constraints, and the linguistic, layout, generic and design practices constraints) on the trailers, which is elaborated in the chapter of conclusion.It is hoped that the present study can provide people with a deeper interpretation of movie trailers and offer an integrative research approach for genre analysis for other multimodal documents.