Multimodal Discourse Analyses Of English Promo Videos Of Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games

With the development of technology, people who live in the era of multimedia gradually started to share information through more than one semiotic resource simultaneously. The changes of people’s ways of communication broadened their fields of studying discourse. Then a new research field called multimodal discourse analysis emerged in 1990 s. It was not until 2003 that the studies of it were introduced to China. Previous researches on it at home and abroad have made much contribution so far in both theoretical framework and practical application. However, they were still insufficient in some areas, like the studies of dynamic promo videos. Therefore, this thesis aims at analyzing the English promo videos of Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis, which will enrich people’s abilities to appreciate or produce these informative promo videos in the future.The research can be divided into three steps. Firstly, based on Zhang Delu’s dynamic multimodal discourse analysis model and Kress & van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar, this research proposes a detailed framework which includes the culture level, the context level and the content level. Secondly, according to Zhang Delu’s method to transcribe the dynamic discourse, this research transcribes these promo videos into 766 images. Thirdly, the transcribed images are analyzed in detail according to the proposed framework. The level of culture discusses the Chinese ideology and the communicative purposes of these promo videos according to the classification of all images. The context level researches the field, tenor and mode of these videos. The level of content investigates the chosen discourse’s visual mode, auditory mode and synergy of these two modes.There are three major findings of this research.First and foremost, at the level of culture, these promo videos show that the pursuit and respect for the Olympic spirit are one of the essential parts of Chinese ideology. The communicative purposes of these videos can be generally summarized into three aspects: presenting China’s traditional culture and modern civilization, showing its eagerness to host the Games and demonstrating its abilities to present extraordinary Olympic Winter Games.Secondly, at the context level, the concurrence of field, tenor and mode in these promo videos forms the dynamic multimodal discourse. The field of these promo videos is official propaganda. The tenor includes two parts. One is the social relations between the official website and the International Olympic Committee. The other is the social relations between the official website and the viewers around the world. The mode belongs to the synergy of the visual mode and the auditory mode.Last but not least, in the visual mode, the representational meaning is mainly achieved by both narrative images and conceptual images. The interactive meaning is mainly realized by the offer act, close-up shots, horizontal perspective and high modality. The compositional meaning is mainly constructed by images in which key information is on the left or right side, salience is shown by color & size & perspective and only a small amount of framing is used. In the auditory mode, the background music is carefully chosen and suitable for these videos. Meanwhile, different sound effects are applied to set the background music off. As for the synergy of the visual mode and the auditory mode, these promo videos interact with each other and are integrated to construct the intended meanings. Both of the visual mode and the auditory mode are closely related to the theme of each video. Even if the visual mode provides more information than the auditory mode, the role of the auditory form in constructing meanings should not be ignored.