A Multimodal Stylistic Analysis Of Visual Images And Verbal Expression In English News Reports

Multimodality applied in the field of news report has emerged as new current of research in linguistics.As one aspect of the hot discussed interdisciplinary issue,news report with visual images plays an increasingly significant role in social life interaction especially in such continuously updated informational era.After the coming era of the multimedia technique,news text no longer limit to single form of text,but contains many other communicative methods,among them,image,color,body language,facial expression and picture arrangement largely enrich the meaning expression and meanwhile,manifest the diversity of communication resources.In order to achieve the subjectivity,news reports,from the perspective of ideational function of systemic functional grammar,mainly include material processes and relational processes,while mental processes and behavioral processes are rare,as an implicit factor of meaning creation,image/screenshot has largely taken the role of attitudinal complement.Therefore,besides facts presentation,images transmit ideological meanings,either implicit or explicit.However,by what way the visual image and textual meaning are likely taken to exhibit the reporters’ opinion is a worthwhile aspect for further studying.The distribution of the meaning realized by image and that by words crucially affect the understanding of the meaning lying behind: the two may be parallel in status,complementing each other,or one depending on the other,reinforcing the other,or one embodying the other,elaborating,extending or enhancing the other.Among them,any kind of meaning can become prominent and if these features are relevant to the context of situation or the communicative purpose,they will supposedly contribute to a kind of stylistic features.This research,from one aspect,is about how those meanings are created and changed through case study of various screenshot/photography taken from news report.Another is the influence of visual modality towards the literature style from the perspective of stylistics,i.e.to look into how the meaning changed through the different ways of composition of pictures,images,typographies,outlays,colors so as to manifest it’s unique style.Alongside various social semiotic resources,visual modality has been applied in every angle of people’s life to construct or construe manner of meaning both informatively and ideologically under the impact of different culture,economy,religion,politics,and regional characteristic and so on.Compared with words,pictures allows for ideas to flow and grow which may otherwise get stuck to a dead end by definite textual information alone,meanwhile,reasoning and imagination help to expand the meaning which may not be directly expressed by words.The difference between word and image is that the latter constructs it’s meaning by semiotics and photography techniques,so that is why in this thesis,Visual Grammar by Kress and van Leeuven is mainly applied in analyzing.Finally,the thesis focus on the rhetorical function of visual modality from the perspective of stylistics,and exhibits by exploring various cases of visual images of news reports the function of pictures,and analyzes how the meaning are manifested in those features such as parallelism,reinforcement,contradiction(appearing),rendering,and expanding.