A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of American Films

In the information age,the impact of mass media has been exceedingly expanded to involve nearly all areas of human's social life.For the time being,information is delivered,compared by single text before,often by sound,image,video and so on.In the early 1990s,multimodal discourse analysis came into being and attracted increasing attention from western linguists.Multimodal discourse analysis broke limitations in the past that most attention of the linguists' has been focused on the language proper,and more comprehensive practical effect of such semiotic modes as images,sound and language in discourse were explored.To certain extent,this enriches and develops the theory and practice of discourse analysis.Based on Halliday's three meta-functions of language in functional grammar,Kress and Leeuwen proposed the three meanings of image,namely representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning.The Visual Grammar offers a systemic framework for analyzing images and further helps its readers to better understand the information.In the field of discourse analysis,film has attracted increasing attention from linguists because of its wide audience and rapid development and scholars began to study and further analyze their characteristics and functions by different modalities.At present,most of the studies are focused on the perfection and application of the theory of multimodal discourse analysis,while there are few studies concerning the relationship between different modes.However,as an important foundation for constructing the multimodal discourse and understanding its mechanism,the study of the coordination and integration among different modalities has become an important part of current research.The theoretical basis of this thesis is Kress and Van Leeuwen's Visual Grammar and O'Halloran's filmic discourse analysis framework and a descriptive method is adopted.The materials are 34 shots that are selected from one of the most famous American films,The Shawshank Redemption,and a multimodal discourse analysis was conducted from the three perspectives.Mise-en-scene(the shot)was taken as a single unit in the analysis of the film.In order to figure out how the three meta-functional meanings,namely the representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning are realized in the film discourse,frames in every one of selected shot were analyzed in view of basic modalities,such as images,music,text etc.Finally,it briefly clarifies role of auditive modality in expressing the meaning of movie discourse,and the way to achieve the natural integration and interaction between visual modality and auditive modality,and jointly construct the whole meaning of movie discourse.This study has applied value to theory and practice respectively.Firstly,it has widely broadened the research field of multimodal discourse analysis,and confirmed the reliability and feasibility of visual grammar to analyze films;Secondly,it has provided a new perspective on multimodal discourse identification and appreciation of the American film for the audience.