Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Family Planning Posters

As the society develops, it is believed that language is not the only means to construct and convey meaning. Other social signs, such as images, gestures, sounds and videos are regarded as important resources to construct meaning in various kinds of social practices. Therefore, multimodality has become an outstanding characteristic of discourse. However, previous discourse studies mainly focus on language, while few were made about the images.From 1990 s, Kress & Van Leeuwen gradually developed Halliday’s Functional Grammar and put forward a new theory for multimodal discourse analysis, that is, the Visual Grammar. Corresponding to the Functional Grammar, Kress & Van Leeuwen hold the opinion that images also can fulfill three metafunctions, which are called representational metafunction, interactive metafunction and compositional metafunction.The family planning policy has been implemented in C hina for several decades. The poster has played an important role for publicizing the policy. Applying Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar to do a multimodal discourse analysis of the family planning posters of different ages, this thesis attempt to explore how the image of family planning is constructed in each period, and what are the differences and similarities of the construction. Specifically speaking, in 1970 s, family planning policy was mainly constructed as the need for revolution; in 1980 s, it was established as a basic state policy and was constructed as the need for economic development to a large degree; from 1990 s to now, the family planning policy was connected with more and more new issues, such as caring for girls and building a harmonious society and so on.It is found that by using the means of vector, contact, distance, perspective, modality, information value, and salience and so on, the posters of different ages fulfill different representational meaning, interactive mea ning and compositional meaning and the meaning construction is closely related to the social background of different times.