A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Universities’ WeChat Homepages

WeChat public account is a newly-developing media channel which has great impact on individuals’ lives.The public account operated by university or college acts as a publicity and service platform to conduct admissions promotion,campus culture transmission,and ideology construction.The homepage of WeChat public account is a mobile-based page similar to a web-based homepage,and its discourse features a multimodal discourse.This thesis carries out a case study of WeChat Homepage of Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics on the basis of Systemic Functional Grammar,Visual Grammar and Image-text Relation Theory,focusing on the two primary modes,namely text and image of the JUFE Homepage,and their relations.In an effort to promote the development of new-media discourse analysis and lay a theoretical foundation for the operation and optimization of the universities’ WeChat public accounts,this research reached the intended purposes.The major findings are listed as follows.The interpersonal function of articles’ titles on WeChat homepage of JUFE in terms of viewers’ engagement is achieved through mood and modality system.In mood system,both declarative mood,interrogative mood,imperative mood and exclamatory mood are employed to highlight the vividness and diversity of articles’ titles to attract viewers’ attentions.On account of features of Chinese,modality of the articles’ titles are often realized through personal pronouns.The second person emerges the most frequently.By making a face-to-face alike communication and shortening the distance between the producers and the viewers,second person enable a more effective information transmission and persuade viewers’ engagement.The representational meaning of the images is realized by both narrative and conceptual processes with narrative processes being much frequently used than conceptual processes,which is coincidence with the fact that the universities’ WeChat homepage serves as a publicity platform representing campus events,activities and so forth.In terms of interactive meaning,the images engage the viewers through the subjective choices of the producers concerning contact,social distance,perspective and modality.The producers prefer to engagethe viewers by offering some detailed information rather than demanding something from the viewers or creating an imaginary relation between viewers and the represented participants.The represented participants are usually presented to engage the viewers through mid-shot,frontal and horizontal angle,which is said to establish an equally social relationship between the represented participants and the viewers.Moreover,most of images are in high modality which strengthen the credibility of the images on homepage to attract viewers’ attention.Compositionally,most images are in centre-margin structure,with the represented participants placed in central part seen as the crucial information of the articles.Both Salience and Framing are employed frequently to stand out the represented participants in some way to engage the viewers.The majority of titles and images on WeChat homepage of JUFE are in unequal image-text relation.Apart from contrast,all other four relations,which are specification,explanation,similarity and complement,are employed in constructing meaning of articles on WeChat homepage of JUFE to engage the viewers.