A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Documentary Chinese New Year,2016

With the advent of the digitized information era,multimedia has become the main way for people to express and acquire information.Various semiotic resources,such as language,sound,image and etc.can coordinate together to construct the integrated meaning of a discourse.Therefore,language text is no longer the only research object in discourse analysis.The multimodal discourse analysis(MDA)came into being.The theoretical framework of this thesis is Kress and Van leeuwen's Visual Grammar and Zhang Delu's Integrated framework of Multimodal Discourse Analysis.Visual grammar is the first grammatical system for interpreting visual modality,based on Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar;Professor Zhang Delu put forward an integrated framework to analyze the verbal and non-verbal text in terms of cultural level,contextual level,content level and expression level.This thesis takes the BBC documentary the Chinese New Year,2016 as the research subject and adopts the qualitative research method and the analytical method to interpret the selected 26 representative iamges from the view of conceptional meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning to examine its integrated meaning construction.Combining Zhang Delu's comprehensive theoretical framework of MDA,it focuses on the interrelationship between the visual and auditive modalities and studies its cultural meaning hidden in the image.Meanwhile,it identifies the Chinese Spring Festival and its colorful customs in foreign producers' eyes and helps viewers to interpret and appreciatedocumentary better.The thesis draws a conclusion that the combination of various semiotic resources in visual images to some extent can achieve the integrated meaning construction;what's more,there exist complementary and non-complementary relationships between visual and auditive modalities,and the former is the main type;finally,documentary works as a way of intercultural communicaiton,the visual images display the Chinese traditional customs and its culutral connotations about Chinese New Year effectively.In a word,the research on documentary proves that MDA provides a new and comprehensive perspective for analysing for interpreting documentary.To analyze and publicize Chinese folk customs from the perspective of intercultural communication is of great significance and inspiration for shaping a good image of China and spreading Chinese culture.