An Analysis On Visual Communication And Relationship Of Images And Discourses Of Disaster News

Under the theoretical framework of multimodal literacy,the thesis aims to investigate the signifying functions and ways of images of disaster news and summarize the composition of contents and meaning expression of the discourses based on Kress and van Leeuwen's visual grammar and M.A.K Haliday' Systematical Functional Grammar.255 Breaking News Photography award-winning works of Pulitzer Prize from 2000 to 2017 are selected as examples to analyze and reveal the way of visual communication and meaning making of images and discourses qualitatively and quantitatively.The thesis also analyzes the relationship between the images and discourses of disaster news and the relationship between visual-verbal relation and the meaning making of the disaster news under the theoretical framework of Martinec and Salway.The study shows that the disaster news images form a more vivid and direct visual communication of victims' status,action,reaction and the process of the change of disasters through the reproduction of narrative and a large amount of visual information.The visual construction is primarily head-up supplemented and secondarily overlooking,and is superior to the sense of substitution of the text;in this sense,it will not only make the viewer of the image observe the whole process and the specific details of the catastrophe clearly,but also it can arouse viewers' deep empathy,making them feel more sympathetic for the situation and for the victims,which increases the literal account of the power.A moderately saturated color modal will be more subjective and sensible than words in narration,and it will be more visually forceful in creating objective catastrophic environment,which ensures the authenticity of the catastrophic events.The highlighting of the visual elements and the clearness of the line breaks can help readers to reduce the cognitive efforts in interpreting the meaning of the images,and thus helps the viewers to interpret the meaning of the news quickly.Besides,the discourses of catastrophic news as a textual symbol describes and extends via detailed textual narration the information that disaster images cannot be presented in more specific details and in the social context of the disaster.The frequent application of declarative sentences,modal verbs and pictures will help to restore the completion of the information and thus helps the news editors to judge more accurately the contents of the disaster news.The extensive use of the coordinate conjunctions will help to express the logic of the meaning of the image,and this will reduce the logical empty space in the understanding and interpretation of the image contents for news consumers and finally simplifies the idea of the news meaning.After analysis,we find that disaster news images and discourses are equally in status and they show a concrete relationship of mutual expansion in the semantic logic.By the analysis on the relationship between visual-verbal relation and meaning making of the disaster news,we find that the interaction between the images and discourses of disaster news is the effective way to construct the meaning of the disaster news,and also the effectiveness of the meaning construction of disaster news is the goal of the construction of the relationship between images and discourses of disaster news.The choice of the visual-verbal relation plays a vital role on the effective expression of the meaning of disaster news.