Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Olympic Emblems

The era of image reading has arrived. Text used for transmitting informationcannot fulfill various communicative needs. Image, as a main tool for informationtransmitting, has some advantages over text. Thus many linguist scholars begin todo a lot of researches in this area. Multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) hasbecome very popular and has developed very fast since1990s. Rhetoric of theImage of Roland Barthes and Reading Image of Kress and van Leevueen (1996) arefoundation works of MDA. Kress and van Leevueen (1996) put forward the notionof visual grammar which is widely applied to different areas such as advertising,film and other areas.Olympic emblems, as a unique semiotic signs, transmit not only generalinformation about this international event but also some special culture-relatedinformation. This paper attempts to analyze the Olympic emblems from perspectiveof multimodal discourse analysis. The analysis is made from two lines, one is text,and the other is image. The text (such as time, place and event information) andimage (such as people, animal and geometrical shapes) in emblems focus on howrepresentational meanings, interactive meanings and compositional meanings areperformed.The representational meanings of texts are realized through content andlanguage of the text; representational meanings of images are realized throughnarrative and conceptual process of the image. The interactive meanings of texts arerealized by text size and font; interactive meanings of images are realized by eyecontact and social distance of people and geometrical shapes on emblem. Thecompositional meanings of texts are analyzed from text placement; thecompositional meanings of images are analyzed from two aspects: framing linesand placement of the Olympic Rings which only appear in18emblems.Besides text and image, the analysis also reveals features and values of Olympic emblems. The Olympic emblems show Olympic spirit and host country'sculture and history. The Olympic emblem design is full of dual elements:indigenous and international; static and dynamic; inherited and creative elements.Based on the analysis, findings about text information can be summarized asfollows. Of all the27emblems,59.2?text is in English,37.1?emblems contain‘time' and ‘place' information,70.4?text uses uniform size within the same emblem. Inmodern emblem design,85.2?fonts are ready-made, and14.8?are creative which areintegrated into image design.62.9?text is put in top/bottom position. The findingsabout image information: representational meanings are conveyed through imagesof human beings, animals, landscapes and geometrical shapes. Of all the27emblems,22.2?emblems contain human being,3.7?animals, and74.1?geometrical shapes. As mentioned above,6emblems have human beings inemblems among which83.3?emblems of these emblems have close social distance toviewers. The emblems with geometrical shapes combine host countries' culture andOlympic spirit perfectly. The analysis also finds that59.2?emblems have framinglines;66.6?emblems have the Olympic Rings,11.2?emblems put the OlympicRings in top area;44.4?emblems put the Olympic Rings in bottom area; and44.4?emblems put the Olympic Rings in center area.