| Multimodal discourse is a social practice that employs two or more semiotic resources for meaning making, for instance, language, images, sound, sculpture and gestures, etc. With the help of multimedia technology, multimodal discourse has been becoming ubiquitous in daily communication. Traditional discourse analysis invariably manages to explain how language expresses meanings from different perspectives. Nevertheless, multimodal discourse analysis mainly focuses on the meaning making of many semiotic resources, language being just one of them.News gallery is a kind of representative multimodal discourse combining texts, images, layout, color, fond, etc. This thesis selects the news gallery of The 10th China-ASEANExpo as the corpus. Based on Kress & van Leeuwen’s visual grammar and Martinec & Salway’s framework for image-text relations, The research aims to seek answers to the following questions:(1) How do images in the corpus construct meanings by the principle of visual grammar? (2) How are image-text relations realized? (3) What implications does the research have for the design of the news gallery as well as other ASEAN-related materials?The research has great significance both in theory and practice. Theoretically, not only can it enlarge the research scope of visual grammar to some extent, but also provide a brand new perspective for the analysis of the news gallery. Practically, the research helps to reveal the features of the images and image-text relations of the corpus, having reference meaning for the future design of news gallery and other multimodal materials.Combined descriptive-analytical with quantitative research methods, the thesis makes major findings:first, abiding by the principle of naturalistic coding orientation, modality markers (color, contextualization, brightness, etc.) show images in the corpus have high modality, which objectively represent the appearance of the exposition. Secondly, images in the corpus fully represent three meanings of the visual grammar. In terms of representational meaning,61% of the images are narrative,39% are conceptual. In terms of interactive meaning, the analysis of contact, social distance and perspective all suggests that the news gallery is designed as a resource of information but estranges itself from the viewer. Thirdly, the system of image-text relations consists of two subsystems:status and logico-semantics. The statuses of image-text are mostly equal, only 18% is unequal. Images and texts are invariably related by the logico-semantic relation of expansion, which verifies the point that projection is usually used in two contexts of comic strips and combinations of text and diagrams. Fourthly, based on the analysis, the thesis claims the design of the corpus has implications for that of other multimodal discourses such as commercial advertisements, textbooks and multimedia courseware. Images can not only provide objective information, but also are related to the viewer in different ways. For publication or learning materials, it is suggested that images in them shall create affinity with the viewer positively so as to be appealing. |
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