A Study On Language And Social Class In Filmic Discourse From The Perspective Of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis

The study on language and class is one of the classic topics in sociolinguistics,and it has accompanied the birth and development of sociolinguistics.The class variations of language often appear in the form of bilingualism or multilingualism in regions that experienced a history of being colonized.In regions with the phenomenon of multilingualism,the class differences in language choice in a way reflect the power relations and ideologies.In order to study this topic,this thesis selects the filmic discourse Hindi Medium as the research material.The film explores the social factors behind the language phenomenon by telling a story of the school-choosing issue of a middle-class family in India.In order to better study the filmic multimodal discourse and to explore its social significance,this thesis adopts the research method of multimodal critical discourse analysis.The main research contents include:(1)the verbal and visual modalities meaning construction and the relations between the modalities in the filmic discourse(2)the language phenomenon and its power relations and ideologies revealed by the meaning construction of the filmic discourse.This research found that:(1)verbal modality expresses attitudes,opinions and meanings with the help of characters of different classes in the film;(2)visual modality uses representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning to express characters' features,to propel storyline and to establish a connection with the audience;(3)two modalities present a complementary relation;(4)language,social class and education resources,the three power relation factors interact with each other,and they reflect ideologies such as classism,discrimination in education,languagism and English imperialism.In addition,this thesis analyzes filmic discourse from the perspective of multimodal critical discourse analysis,which not only expands the application scope of the method,but also provides the audience with another perspective on the appreciation of filmic discourse.