| Being a type of legal discourse,public legal education belongs to the research scope of forensic linguistics.With the development of science and technology,various new media have sprung up,and the aesthetics of the public and ways of receiving information have changed greatly with it: traditional forms for public legal education such as leaflets,billboards,banners and posters are so single and insipid that they can neither draw people's attention nor can they satisfy people's increasing needs for information dissemination.However,new media has the ability to solve this problem.Forms of video,animation and micro-film deploy viewers' visual and auditory sense organs sufficiently and transmit information in a much more vivid and lively way,which can make audience have a more impressive experience on public legal education.Therefore,it is necessary to pay attention to such multimodal discourses and probe into what semiotic modes are employed to express legal attitudes,how these modes relate to each other and how the images interact with viewers to arouse their legal awareness so as to realize the aim of public legal education.Moreover,it is of great significance in providing some practical suggestions for producers.Attitude is one of the most important parts of appraisal theory.Since its appearance in 1990 s,appraisal theory has been broadly applied to study news discourse,dialogues and academic discourse.Nevertheless,they mainly focus on appraisal resources in language.There are few studies concentrating on multimodal appraisal.Audio-visual public service advertisements are multimodal discourses that convey the legal attitude of the producer and expect the audience to raise their legal attitude.Thus,it is essential to establish a framework of attitudinal meaning construction for audio-visual public service advertisements of public legal education.This thesis downloads 24 audio-visual public service advertisements of public legal education from video websites and annotates them all in Multimodal Analysis Video,in which we can not only see the semiotic modes applied in themsimultaneously,but we can also see how the images interact with the viewer.Besides,this thesis applies two pieces of audition software that are used separately for eliminating background music and showing spectrograms and speech data.The application of software to some extent can decrease the subjectivity of this study,which is hardly seen in previous studies.It is found that language is the main mode.Without language,it will be hard to understand meaning.However,as multimodal discourse,in addition to language,other semiotic modes such as voice,facial expressions,gestures and ambience are all practical modes to express attitudinal meaning.With time limitations,the attitudes are often inscribed.The aim of the advertisements is to raise people's legal awareness.How they attract people,resonate and impress them is quite essential.Contact,distance and perspective are three dimensions of interactive meaning that constitute a complex and subtle relation with viewers.Dealing well with the three dimensions can receive an unexpected result.In addition,relations between modes should also be taken into consideration.They can be complementary or non-complementary.In complementary relation,they can be reinforcement or non-reinforcement,while in non-complementary relation,they can be overlapping,containment or context interaction.Making great use of these modes can make the content vivid,sufficient and impressive,which is beneficial for the aim of public legal education. |
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