The Analysis Of Dynamic Multimodal Discourses

In the 21 st century,the multimodality of meaning and the diversity of genres have become the trend of language development.The university promotional video,which integrates sound,text,picture and other modes,is a typical dynamic multimodal discourse.It has always been a research focus of communication and other related disciplines,but has rarely attracted the attention of linguistic researchers.Based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar,Kress& van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar,and the study of paralinguistic features,this thesis constructs a new analytical framework.By taking the promotional video of Peking University,Harvard University and Mc Gill University as the research object,the author tries to explore the characteristics and meaning construction of the verbal,visual and auditory mode as well as their internal relationship in the university promotional video.To do this,the author makes a detailed qualitative analysis combined with a quantitative method so as to obtain an objective and persuasive result.Conclusions are drawn as follows.In the aspect of the verbal mode,the material process and the relational process in transitivity system are more often used to realize the ideational meaning.For interpersonal meaning,the declarative mood,low value modal operators and the first person are mainly adopted.For textual meaning,the unmarked theme,and reference and conjunction cohesive devices are more employed.In terms of the visual mode,for representational meaning,narrative process especially action process is more often employed.For interactive meaning,the “offer” contact,public distance,and perspectives like frontal,oblique and eye-level appear frequently.For compositional meaning,the center and margin information value layout and salience realization ways of color,size,and foreground are more adopted.Framing devices are also used.With regard to the auditory mode,background music supports the other modes and makes the video more attractive.The use of vocal modifiers,vocal characterizers and vocal segregates can modify the semantic meaning and make the video more authentic.Concerning the internal relationship of different modalities,complementation and reinforcement are mainly used.A fully understanding of the video’s overall meaning relies on the integration of different modalities.