| The website is a significant platform for each company to advertise its goods and services and display the public image.In the era of rapid development of science and communication technology,website will play a positive role in the promotion of company’s information.Website news is a real-time update section of the company’s website,which can make the audience know the latest news and apperceive the development trends.Moreover,the website news combines the verbal and nonverbal information,which breaks through the defect of the single language symbols spreading the single information,and makes the image,sound,language and other symbols work together to convey the more vivid meaning.The diversity of discourse composition makes it difficult for traditional single-modal discourse analysis methods to fully explain the meaning of discourse generation.At this time,the emergence of multi-modal approach makes discourse research enter a new realm.Multimodality means that multiple modes interact together to form a text and generate meaning.Visual Grammar proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen in 1996 is an important theoretical framework for the analysis of multimodal discourse.On the basis of Halliday’s theory,they pointed out that multimodal discourse has three main meanings:representational meaning,interactive meaning,and compositional meaning.This theoretical framework points the way for future generations to analyze multimodal discourse.In this paper,30 pieces of news from the English websites of Apple and Huawei are respectively selected and taken as a small corpus.Firstly,classify the selected pictures,as shown in Appendix Ⅱ.Secondly,select individual cases for analysis.Finally,use mood system to analyze the words.By doing so,the paper aims to explore the following three questions:(1)What are the similarities and differences of the use of images in the selected news of Apple’s and Huawei’s company?(2)What are the similarities and differences of the use of tense and modality in the selected news of Apple’s and Huawei’s company?(3)What suggestions can the comparative study of Apple’s and Huawei’s news’ images and words provide for the other companies’ news writing?By using the above analysis process and exploring the three questions,the author draws the following findings.In the aspect of image application,the similarities and differences of the two companies is mainly realized through the following three points.(1)The speakers and products are the main images of the two companies’ news,which convey the main information of the news to the audience in an intuitive and concise way.In the use of representational meaning,the two companies reflect the opposite trend.Huawei uses more narrative process and less conceptual process than Apple.(2)In the process of highlighting the interactive meaning,the two companies achieve the interaction effect with the audience through using attitudes.Apple uses more methods of front view and close-up,while Huawei often uses vertical viewpoint.(3)In the process of using compositional meaning,the two companies pay much attention to the location of important information and secondary information.The data shows that most of the important information is placed in the center.At the same time,Huawei also attaches importance to the role of left and right positions to highlight the information value.In terms of tense and modality,(1)the news of the two companies is dominated by the present tense,and Huawei has a higher use ratio of past and future tenses than Apple.(2)In the aspect of modality,both Huawei and Apple take the medium modal verbs as the main modal verbs.Apple’s use of low-value modal verbs is higher than that of Huawei,but the use of medium modal verbs is lower than Huawei’s. |
