A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Compositional Meaning Of The Front Cover Of China Today

Nowadays, the information era comes with the rapid development of science and technology. People communicate and share thoughts, feelings and pictures at a high speed. As one of the commonest public discourses, front cover is always popular among linguists. In the information era, only to study the verbal modality on the front covers of magazines is unable to meet the current demand. Therefore, scholars shift their attention to both words and images, which form a multimodal discourse. Halliday’s(1985) Systemic Functional Grammar offers a basis for multimodal theoretical framework. Kress and Leeuwen(2006) construct the Visual Grammar based on Halliday’s theories of metafunctions and provide a systematic theoretical framework for Multimodal Discourse Analysis.Previous studies only focused on analyzing multimodal discourse of magazines published within a certain year and ignored the change of multimodality features over time in multimodal discourse. In this thesis, multimodal discourse theories, including Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, Kress & Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar and Leeuwen’s theory of relations between words and images, are applied to make a Multimodal Discourse Analysis of 36 front covers of China Today in 1969, 1999 and 2014. By exploring how the textual meaning of verbal modality and the compositional meaning of the visual modality are constructed, and seeking what the verbal-visual composition and relations are, the features of multimodality on the front covers of China Today in the three different years are depicted.The results of this study show that the front covers of China Today are typical examples of multimodal discourses, which include the verbal modality and the visual modality. In the visual modality, the approach to creating meaning by salience has not changed. But the way to reflect information value has changed over time. The verbal modality of the front covers of China Today becomes more and more mature as time goes by. Although dramatic changes have taken place in the verbal modality, the visual modality is still the major modality employed to create the meaning of the front covers. But the change of verbal modality results in that of verbal-visual relations.