A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of BBC Documentary Wild China

Digitized information,as a significant mark for the twenty-first century, has stepped deeply into people’s daily life. Many semiotic resources, such as images, music and color, which are traditionally considered as the accessories of social communication, have taken prominent position today. Since the original single-modal language communication cannot meet the needs of people, thus multimodal discourse arises and grows prosperity. It can’t be denied that the appearance of multimodal discourse analysis breaks the restriction that only traditional text is aimed as the research object. Multimodal discourse analysis takes other semiotics resources, such as images, music and etc. into consideration. Nowadays, there are numerous researches on multimodal discourse analysis, while Kress and van Leeuwen put forward the visual grammar based on the three metafunctions of systemic functional grammar. They probed how the different semiotic resource in images works in representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning and at the same time they extended the theory into three dimensional images and filmic discourse which provided a practical and effective research framework for multimodal discourse analysis.As a representation of multimodal discourse, the film fuses multiple means of meaning expression such as image, sound, music and color. The serial documentary Wild China, which is co-produced by China Central Television(CCTV) and British Broadcasting Corporation(BBC), attracts the attention of the world for its high artistic level. This study has chosen two episodes of the documentary Wild China, Land of the Panda and Beyond the Great Wall as well as selected thirty-seven representative images as the research data. Based on the theory of functional grammar, the present study is designed to apply the visual grammar in exploring the meaning construction and the relations between different modalities of this documentary. A comprehensive statistics of multiple means in conveying meaning is also included. Both quantitative and qualitative research methods are adopted in this study.Through analysis and discussion, this thesis has found out that as a representation of multimodal discourse, Wild China has applied different semiotic resources in meaning expression; and the narrative process is the dominant method to reveal the facts; while the horizontal angle and high modality images are mostly used to maintain the objectivity and authenticity; whereas the central-margin setting is adopted for highlighting the information value; and moreover, complementary and non-complementary relations exist between different modalities in the process of jointly conveying message. It can be concluded that the multimodal discourse analysis of BBC Documentary Wild China has proved the feasibility of visual grammar on documentary research. Besides, this research has expended the research scope for multimodal discourse analysis. Meanwhile, this research result can help to perceive the invisible and implied information behind this documentary and the interaction between producer and audience on the ideological level. Thus, to a certain extent, this study can enhance the overall understanding and appreciation of the audience, so that people can interpret the great charm of Wild China from a new perspective.