A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of City Image Promotional Video

Due to the rapid development of modern information technology,the way of people’s life and communication has undergone profound changes.Language is no longer the only carrier of daily information transmission.Multimodal elements such as image,color,voice,gesture play an increasingly important role in people’s daily communication.These elements are integrated together in a dynamic form to convey information,which is called multimodal discourse.It has been nearly 30 years since the emergence of multimodal discourse analysis(short for MDA),and its related researches have achieved fruitful results.In recent years,dynamic videos composed of text,image,music,etc.,are becoming one of the most popular ways of city publicity,which is also an important window for people to know the cities.Since the rise of the city image promotional video in the late 1990 s,it has played an important role in building city brand,enhancing regional image,facilitating tourism,attracting investment,promoting urban economic development and improving urban competitiveness.The research of city image promotional videos is a brand-new subject,it has just started,and the research results are not plentiful.In recent years,it has become a new hot area of research for domestic scholars.This thesis selects the representative city image promotional video Tianfu Chengdu as the research material,adopting qualitative and quantitative research methods to interpret it from the perspective of MDA based on Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar(short for SFG),Kress & van Leeuwen’s visual grammar,Van Leeuwen’s auditory grammar,and Zhang Delu’s multimodal synergy theory.To ensure the accuracy of the research,the author employs the software of ELAN and Praat to analyze the video from three aspects: verbal modality,visual modality and auditory modality,aiming to answer the following two research questions:1.How do the verbal,visual and auditory modalities of the city image promotional video Tianfu Chengdu construct meaning respectively?2.What are the relationships among different modalities and how do they work together to complete the meaning construction of the video?Through the research and analysis,the main findings of this thesis are as follows:First,verbal mode in the promotional video mainly realizes the meaning construction in three ways: ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function.Its main function is to convey information related to the theme,including the history,culture,development,and achievements of Chengdu.Visual mode in the video is mainly constructed by representational meaning,interactive meaning,and compositional meaning.The dynamic images are used to concretize some abstract concepts,and show the city style and humanistic landscape.While auditory mode in the video can reflect the three meta-functions at the same time,and promote the development and change of verbal and visual modality.Second,from the perspective of multimodal coordination,audio-visual synchronization is often used in video,and the appropriate use of audio-visual asynchronization reflects the characteristics of dynamic discourse and can also achieve better publicity effects.The different modes of language,image and sound in the video are not independent,and their relationship is mainly reflected in the complementary relationship.The various modes cooperate and complement each other,which helps to achieve the expected publicity effect,and then construct the overall meaning of the video.This study verifies the practicability and feasibility of interpreting dynamic multimodal discourse from the perspective of MDA,which not only broadens the research field of MDA,but also enriches the research perspective of city image promotional video.At the same time,this study provides a new perspective for the audience to enjoy the promotional video,and also has a reference significance for the production of the city image promotional videos.In addition,there are some limitations in this study,such as the analysis materials are not rich enough,and the subjectivity of the analysis process.It is hoped that future studies can achieve more abundant research results on this basis.