A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of BBC Documentary The Story Of China

With the development of science and technology,a multimodal communication combined with characters,voice and visible images is much more preferred than traditional written communication,accordingly multimodal discourse analysis emerges as required.At present,the domestic and foreign research on multimodal discourse analysis mainly focuses on static discourse,but less on dynamic discourse.And the existing researches on dynamic discourse genres are almost exclusively advertising or drama film and rarely involve the documentary.Therefore,this thesis takes the BBC documentary The Story of China released in 2015,as the research subject,in an attempt to make a multimodal discourse analysis.The four typical shots with various multimodal characteristics of the first episode Ancestor in The Story of China are selected to make the analysis.Firstly,a dynamic multimodal discourse analysis framework in the unit of shot is designed based on Kress and van Leeuwen(1996,2006)'s visual grammar and O'Halloran(2004)'s multimodal filmic discourse analysis framework to study how images in this documentary dynamically construct representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning.Secondly,how different modalities in this documentary work together to achieve overall meaning will be analyzed based on Zhang Delu's inter-modal relationship.The major findings of this study are as follows:The various visual symbol resources in the documentary The Story of China have successfully established the representational,interactive,and compositional meaning in shots.The narrative process is more common than the conceptual process in representational meaning,which is easier for audience to receive and understand the information,and deeply feel the great image of China.In the interactive meaning,the offer act in contact is used more frequently,which aims to provide information for viewers;in terms of social distance,close-up shot is taken most to shorten the distance between participants and audiences;the horizontal dimension is used most,which indicates the equal status between participants and audiences;the high modality indicates the truth of passed information.All these means reflect that filmmakers try to tell the Chinese story as objectively as possible from an equal perspective.The compositional meaning is composed of information value,salience and framing.The integration between them creates specific and distinctive character of Chinese culture.Besides,the complete and accurate meaning in the video is not achieved by a single frame but by the shots composed by continuous frames that are connected with each other,and the means to realize the three meanings of each shot are a bit different in that the meaning construction process of each frame in the shot is constantly changing.And there are three modalities of visual,verbal,and audio in the documentary,and it is the interaction of different modalities that realize the complete meaning of the documentary.However,not every modality appears simultaneously in one shot in that they are constantly changing in the process of meaning construction in dynamic discourse,and the combination of modalities is not arbitrary but conforms to a certain complementary and non-complementary relationship to work together to achieve the overall meaning construction and enhance the expression effect of the documentary.In this paper,a dynamic multimodal discourse analysis framework based on visual grammar theory and film multimodal discourse analysis framework is designed to verify the feasibility of these two theories for analyzing dynamic multimodal discourse,which provides a reference of theoretical basis and enriches the research subjects for the dynamic multimodal discourse analysis for others.This study analyzes the BBC documentary The Story of China from a multi-modal perspective,which provides viewers with a new perspective to appreciate this documentary.And it can help viewers deeply understand the image of China constructed and disseminated in this documentary,and interpret China's image and status in the perspective of other countries,and it can also provide the basis and discussion text for our further exploration of the image construction in our country.