A Multimodal Analysis Of The Filmic Discourse On Atonement

With the fast development of science and technology,especially the internet and multimedia,the methods people communicate with each other have undergone a revolutionary change.Multimodality becomes one of the characteristics of daily life in the age of the internet and information.Multimodal Discourse Analysis(MDA),which begins to become a flourishing research field the 1990 s,can overcome some limitations of the study on discourse analysis and provide new heights for discourse analysis.Filmic discourse includes different modes,such as language,image,color,sound,gesture,etc.It is a kind of multimodal discourse and can be researched from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis.According to Briony's psychological changes on her mistake,this thesis divides the film Atonement into three stages: Briony's making mistake;the realization of Briony's mistake;Briony's making atonement.In each stage of the film,this thesis makes a multimodal analysis from four perspectives: the image mode analysis;the analysis of language mode;the analysis of color mode;the analysis of modal relations.Three shots are selected in each stage and this thesis analyzes each shot from the aspects of the representational,interactive and compositional meaning.Based on the theory of the three meta-functions,this thesis makes an analysis of the verbal mode,which are mainly realized through the transitivity system,mood and modality.This thesis also analyzes the color mode and the modal relations among these three modes(image,language,color).The theoretical significance of this research is that it can broaden the application area of multimodal discourse analysis study and test the applicability of analyzing film from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis.The practical significance is that it provides a new angle for the readers to comprehend the overall meaning construction of the multimodal discourse and analyzes the film with the linguistic approach.