A Dynamic Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Environmental Documentary

With the development of multimedia technology and the extensive use of internet, ways to transmit information is no longer limited to mere text. In its place has emerged multimodal discourse, which simultaneously involves language, visual modes, auditory modes and so forth. Studies on multimodality is called multimodal discourse analysis(MDA), aiming at analyzing some or all different semiotic modes in a discourse or a communicative event as well as the integration and cohesion of these modes in the construction of ideational meaning, interpersonal meaning and textual meaning. So far, the MDA studies mainly focus on the theoretical perfection and practical analysis on static discourses, and few studies are conducted on dynamic discourse, especially on the interaction of different semiotic resources in the dynamic process of meaning construction. The sporadic dynamic discourse genres involved in previous studies are mainly restricted to advertising discourse and fiction movies, while documentary genre, particularly environmental documentary, whose multimodal features are quite different from fiction films, is rarely investigated in this field. However, it is of great realistic significance to study environmental documentary from either the artistic perspective or the semiotic perspective considering the fierce conflicts between economic development and environmental protection in today’s China. Therefore, the present study takes the Under the Dome, a sensational Chinese environmental documentary on haze released in 2015, as the research subject, in an attempt to explore the multimodal contribution to its success by analyzing the co-deployment and coordination of multimodal resources in dynamic meaning construction.By integrating Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics, Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar and relevant film theories, the present study designs a multimodal transcription framework apt for present discourse. Based on Thibault and Baldry’s(2006) multimodal transcription framework for advertisement with reference to O’Halloran’s(2004) parameters system for semiotic description in multimodal film discourse, the multimodalities and semiotic modes in Under the Dome are transcribed by resorting to the video analysis software ELAN 4.9.3. On the other hand, a dynamic framework for multimodal discourse analysis is proposed for the present study by integrating and revising Lim’s(2004) Integrated Multi-semiotic Model and Zhang Delu’s(2009) Synthetic Theoretical Framework of MDA. By employing the proposed framework, this paper conducts a descriptive analysis of dynamic multimodal discourse on the basis of the transcription, annotation and statistics of the multimodal resources of the documentary. On the context plane, the factors concerning the context of culture and the context of situation influencing the multimodal semiotic choices are investigated. On the expression plane, the dynamic multimodal features of the documentary discourse are explored based on the observations of multimodal deployments in different generic stages of the documentary. Meanwhile, the study investigates how the multimodal resources interact and cooperate with each other to construct the representational meaning, the interactional meaning and the compositional meaning.The results show that the multimodal semiotic deployments vary in types and proportions in different stages(including introduction stage, reporting stage, and appealing stage) of the documentary for the varied communicative purpose of each stage, among which the multimodal semiotic resources in the reporting stage alternate most frequently involving most semiotic types. Through the appropriate alternation and co-deployment of various semiotic resources, the report on haze made by the speaker in this documentary appears more organized, rationale and attractive, which has in turn made the environmental documentary more persuasive and influential. Besides, in the meaning construction process of the dynamic discourse, the semiotic resources are not purely in a primary-secondary relation, but mutually intensify the whole communicative meaning of the same goal from different angles in a complementary manner or non-complementary manner, to enhance the persuasive effect of the environmental documentary.The concrete analysis of the documentary proves that the revised dynamic framework for multimodal discourse analysis in the present study works as a powerful explanatory tool for the dynamic multimodal discourse analysis of the documentaries recording speech, and that the ELAN software can greatly improve the efficiency of the transcription and statistic sorting for dynamic multimodal discourse. Hence the present study is of referential value to future multimodal discourse analysis of films.