A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Economist’s Front Covers

With the rapid development of science and the advent of the information age, people’s ways of communication have changed greatly. A wide range of semiotic resources have played an increasingly important role in human’s daily communication and the information transmitting. People begin to realize that the traditional discourse analysis specified in language itself is far from comprehensive and exhaustive. Accordingly, discourse analysis is compelled to take more semiotic resources into consideration for the more comprehensive analysis. In the 1990 s, multimodal discourse analysis came into being in western countries and then became a research focus in linguistic studies. Kress and Van Leeuwen are two of the important representatives in the research field of multimodal discourse analysis. In their book Reading Images(1996), Kress and Van Leeuwen establish a systemic and comprehensive framework of visual analysis and describe how the representational, interactive and compositional meanings are realized in images, which has promoted the new development of multimodal discourse analysis. The Economist’s front covers are multimodal discourses which integrate verbal text, image and color, thus this thesis intends to apply multimodal discourse analysis to the study of The Economist’s front covers.This thesis, with fifteen samples selected from The Economist’s front covers as its data and the theoretical framework of multimodal discourse analysis as its basic analytic tool, presents a detailed multimodal discourse analysis on the selected front covers to explore the construction of representational, interactive and compositional meanings of The Economist’s front covers. In addition, in order to elaborate how different modalities of The Economist’s front covers interact with each other to construct the whole meaning of multimodal texts and then achieve their multimodal communicative acts, this thesis selects typical samples from the aspects of politics, economy and environment respectively to conduct a synthetical and in-depth analysis on the multimodal texts.Through analysis, some major findings are found. First, the applicability and feasibility of multimodal discourse analysis on The Economist’s front covers is proved in this thesis. The representational meaning of visual grammar can be seen as an introduction of the cover story of The Economist. The interactive meaning explains the relations among the producer of the images, the viewers and the participants represented by the images. And the compositional meaning shows the way in which the different modalities of The Economist’s front covers are made to relate to each other through information value, framing and salience. The three meanings of visual grammar are all indispensible. They work together to construct the meanings of images in The Economist’s front covers. In addition to the three meanings, this thesis also takes visual-verbal relations and contextual meaning into consideration in the process of the synthetical analysis. It is found that The Economist’s front covers could express profound social meanings and achieve their multimodal communicative acts through the integration of various modalities and related background information.With the theoretical framework of multimodal discourse analysis, this thesis takes The Economist’s front covers as its data, not only extends the applied area of multimodal discourse analysis, but also proposes an efficient image-reading strategy for the readers of The Economist’s front covers to help them improve their abilities of understanding and appreciating The Economist’s front covers. At the same time, this thesis intends to offer theoretical tools for the designers of The Economist’s front covers, which may help the designers work out a better magazine cover that would carry more and deeper meanings in limited space.