| In the era of social media, micro-blogging, as the representative of the new media, has tremendously changed the way people communicate with each other. Micro-blogging is also one of the most important channels to disseminate legal information and ideologies of rule of law. With this platform, some famous lawyers, via micro-blogging, share with others the judicial information in or outside the court trials and their opinions and thoughts on controversial cases, aiming to promote judicial justice on a case-by-case basis and cultivate among legal professionals and lay people the spirit of rule of law through public legal education.The modes of the lawyers’ micro-blogs are rarely monomodal but mostly multimodal, presented as both verbal texts and visual images, with or without audio or video files. Obviously, traditional monomodal texts are no longer able to satisfy their purpose of disseminating legal ideologies. Therefore, the conventional discourse analysis concerned with only verbal texts has been unable to fulfill an in-depth and comprehensive analysis of such multimodal discourse. The combination of verbal texts with more modes like visual images is an indispensable way to impel the multimodal discourse analysis to a new stage. The present research targets the multimodality of lawyers’ or jurists’ micro-blogs.This thesis collects a large number of direct reports on four influential litigations in recent five years and other comments or thoughts on some controversial cases from the related lawyers’ and jurists’ micro-blogs, including numerous verbal texts and 30 related visual images attached. Within the theoretical framework of Functional Grammar and Visual Grammar, this paper investigates the experiential and interpersonal meanings of both verbal and visual modes. Besides, the synergy of verbal and visual modes in the realization of disseminating the ideologies of rule-of-law has been explored on the basis of the image-text status proposed by Martinec and visual-verbal links by van Leeuwen. Furthermore, two typical cases are selected to conduct an intensive and comprehensive analysis to illustrate how the various modes co-work to make meanings of rule of law with the explanation of the current legal context in China.The analysis of the data verifies the applicability of multimodal analytical theories to the micro-blogging discourse. Firstly, in the construction of the experiential meaning, verbal texts depict, in the most direct and concrete way, the judicial activities with transitivity system while the visual images display the actions or facial expressions of the represented participants in synergy. Secondly, in the interpersonal meaning construal, verbal texts mainly offer information to the viewers through declarative mood whereas visual images offer information with no eye contact, but with long shot and eye-level position. Thirdly, as for the synergy of visual and verbal modes, visual images tend to be independent or subordinate to the verbal texts, consistent with the purpose of the lawyers and jurists. Further on the detailed relations, images either specify or complement the texts as the verbal texts themselves express intact meaning even without the visual images. Last but not least, the neglect of the authority of law and judicial injustice constructed by both verbal and visual modes are negative aspects of ideologies of rule of law as those ideologies of rule of law include the authority of law and fairness and justice. Thus, the dissemination of these ideologies is achieved through the revelation of the judicial malpractice.Due to the tentative nature and the limited academic capacity of the research, this research embodies many immature aspects, thus the inadequacies and further research suggestions and directions are pointed out in the end. |
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