A Multimodal Discourse Comparative Analysis Of Human Pictures On Chinese And American Financial Corporate Homepages

With the rapid development of multimedia,the way to convey information is also showing a diversified trend.More and more people use the complex interplay of various modalities like language,color,gesture,gaze,movement,music and space to construct meaning and deliver information.Pictures on corporate homepages embrace various modalities,such as color,language,space arrangement,which are considered as typical multimodal discourses.This study aims to make a comparative analysis of human pictures on Chinese and American financial corporate homepages from the perspective of multimodal discourse.The corpus is from Chinese and American financial corporations listed on 2018' Fortune Global 500.The author simplifies Kress & van Leeuwen's visual grammar and proposes an analytical framework suitable for the present study.By comparing representational,interactive and compositional meanings of human pictures on Chinese and American corporate homepages,this study aims at discovering their similarities and differences in the construction of multimodal discourse.Two questions are to be answered in this study:(1)How meanings are projected and constructed through the representational,interactive and compositional meaning of human images on the homepage of Chinese and American financial corporations respectively?(2)What are the differences and similarities between Chinese and American financial corporations in the process of conveying information through human pictures?It is found that(1)human pictures on Chinese and American corporate homepages both design social action to construct representational meaning.However,Chinese corporations much more frequently use conversation boxes to convey the thoughts of people in pictures than American do;(2)Chinese corporations mostly use close-up and long shot while the other mainly use close-up.And both of them use “offer” images,taking oblique and eye level angles to construct interactive meaning;(3)most Chinese corporations put main information in the middle while American corporations in the vertical axis.They both use size and color contrast to highlight information,and lines to separate information to construct compositional meaning.This study not only enriches the relevant research on multimodal discourse but also enhances the explanatory power of visual grammar.It is hoped that this study is conducive to promoting people's understanding of cultural differences between China and the West.