| Following the rapid progress and development of modern multimedia technology,the role of semiotic systems such as graphics,images,animation,and sounds in social daily communication and cultural communication has become more apparent.Therefore,traditional research is often limited to discourse analysis of language,which can no longer satisfy the current research on multimodality.Since the 1990 s,discourse analysis has gradually adopted a multimodal perspective,and many linguists' research on multimodal discourse has also started from the perspective of social semiotics.Among them,Kress and Van Leeuween proposed a Visual Grammar theory with representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning,which are based on Halliday's Systematic Functional Grammar.Whereafter,Van Leuween proposed Aural Grammar.The studies above provide a theoretical basis and promote the development of multimodal discourse analysis.As a representative form of artistic expression that combines multiple modalities,film discourse is one of the important corpora for multimodal discourse analysis.The film Green Book tells a story between a white Italian-American driver,Tony,and an excellent black pianist Dr.Shirley.During this period of touring of Dr.Shirley,the two people collided all the way,resulting in a story of friendship ignoring race and crossing classes.The film comprehensively uses visual effects and multiple modalities to present a wonderful and thought-provoking journey of life for the audience.It also provides excellent corpus research materials for multimodal discourse analysis researchers to study and learn.In this study,there are 46 figures and 18 sound frequencies chosen from the film which are relevant to the character images and the film theme.And there are 4 analysis graphics made by Praat according to Aural Grammar.On the basis of the theories of Visual Grammar and Aural Grammar,and the framework of complementary relationship between modalities proposed by Zhang Delu,the study shows the images of two protagonists and the themes of the film.The aim is to explore what character images and film themes be constructed by Visual Grammar and Aural Grammar and how different modalities co-work to reflect images and themes.The research results are presented as following:Firstly,at the foundation of representational meaning and interactive meaning in Visual Grammar and the perspective and social distance as well as melody,the study constructs two different images of the two protagonists who are white driver and black pianist in the film Green Book.The study finds that the images of Tony are full and changeable and the images of Dr.Shirley are introverted and contradict.Secondly,based on the representational meaning and interactive meaning as well as compositional meaning of Visual Grammar,and perspective and social distance and melody,the analysis in this thesis finds the two themes of Green Book are racial discrimination and protagonists fighting against racial discrimination.Lastly,from the perspective of the relationship between different modalities,although in some segments the two modalities are independent with each other and work in synergy,while in some segments there is one modality predominant and the other modality strengthens the meaning construction of the main modality.However,whether it is displaying the character images or revealing the themes of a film,the relationships of different modalities are complementary.This research not only broadens the research area of multimodal discourse analysis,but also tests the practicality and feasibility of multimodal discourse analysis.Through the analysis and discussion of multiple modalities in the film,viewers can more fully understand how different modalities in the movie constructs the meaning,highlighting the character images and the theme of the film.Multimodal discourse analysis of film research also provides a new perspective for audiences to appreciate the film discourse,further improving viewers' skills of appreciation film. |
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