A Multimodal Analysis Of Chinese Anti-corruption Political Cartoons

Nowadays,various multimodal technologies have emerged increasingly and meanings have been carried out from sound,image,text to video.Therefore,the focus has been changed from discourse analysis of text to multimodal discourse analysis.At the beginning of 21 st century,Li Zhanzi firstly study on multimodal discourses analysis.And nowadays,multimodal discourses analysis on the basis of Hallday’s systemic functional grammar,although thriving in the western countries in 1990 s,is still at initial stage in China.As for multimodal discourse analysis of Chinese anti-corruption political cartoons,this thesis mainly aims to analyze the intersemiotic complementarity of cartoons from qualitative and quantitative methods to research as follows.And there are three questions to raise and resolve:(1)What are the visual meanings of Chinese anti-corruption political cartoons based on the visual grammar?(2)What is intersemiotic complementarity from three aspects between verbal and visual modes in multimodal discourses in Chinese anti-corruption cartoons?(3)What communication effects do intersemiotic complementarity play in information transmission between verbal and visual modes?For dealing with the three questions,firstly,by means of documentretrieval,this thesis looks up books,collects data(http://www.people.com.cn)and sorts out and makes the literature review about the current researches of multimodal discourse and political cartoons,and then puts forward a theoretical framework for studying.Secondly,based on Kress and Van Leeuwen’s visual grammar,this study focuses on the represented,interactive and compositional meaning of the collected thirty cartoons of Chinese anti-corruption by means of the descriptive method.And thirdly,according to the proposed theoretical framework based on the Royce’s intersemiotic complementarity,the core of the study is to analyze the ideational,interactive and compositional intersemiotic complementarity between verbal and visual modes among the ten cartoons selected from a news report by means of case study and descriptive methods in detail.Finally,it aims to analyze the communication effects that intersemiotic complementarity exerts.The major findings for integration of meaning construction among the ten Chinese anti-corruption political cartoons are as follows.Firstly,the ideational meanings in the two modes are related lexico-semantically through these intersemiotic sense relations: ellipsis,hyponymy,synonymy,repetition and collocation.Secondly,the interactive meanings in verbal and visual modes are integrated through reinforcement of address and intersemiotic attitudinal congruence.Finally,the integration composition meanings in the two modes are constructed through thecompositional relations: salience,information value,visual framing and reading paths.Through the analysis of intersemiotic complementarity between verbal and visual modes in these cartoons,three communication effects are as follows: 1)it is extremely helpful for readers to read more information and then realize the core meaning and value effectively;2)it also promotes readers’ ability of multilitericies during the process of getting a more comprehensive and systemic interpretations;3)to some degree,it is conductive to strength the promotion effects of anti-corruption in order to improve people’s awareness of anti-corruption.What’s more,this complementarity is helpful for designers to use different modes more properly and effectively to transmit information better under the guidance of intersemiotic complemrntarity in order to improve people’s awareness of anti-corruption.