The Construction Of Dialogic Affiliation By Multimodal Interactions In The Documentary Discourse Of Intangible Cultural Heritage

Regarding the Intangible Cultural Heritage(ICH)safeguarding,the documentary film has become a mainstream medium in the digitization of ICH.Two social values that the documentary film has,i.e.restoring the authenticity of ICH and awakening the awareness of audience to safeguard ICH,push producers to focus on the realization of “dialogic affiliation”.It means to construct a social bonding with audience which can express attitudinal stances and forge communion of feeling.This study takes the semiotic interactions in the documentary film of ICH as the research object and their impact on the dialogic affiliation as the research objective,interpreting the contributions made by visual and auditory resources from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis.Informed by the theories of interpersonal meaning in Systemic Functional Linguistics and Visual Grammar,and the Synthetic Theoretical Framework for Multimodal Discourse Analysis(Zhang,2009),this study proposed an analytic framework apt for the dynamic multimodal documentary discourse.Two episodes of traditional craftsmanship in Heritage on Fingertips,Chaozhou Gold Lacquered Woodcarving and Northern School of Jade Carving,were selected as the data.Under the proposed framework,the influence of contextual factors on multimodal choices was firstly investigated on the context level.Next on the content level,a qualitative analysis was conducted to investigate the construction of dialogic affiliation by different meaning-making systems and the effects of modal interrelations.Lastly on the expression level,with the assistance of the annotation software ELAN 5.5,a quantitative analysis of multimodal deployment and distribution was done on the basis of the annotated statistical figures.Three main findings are obtained in this study.Firstly,the context of culture and the context of situation in the documentary discourse both influence the communicative purposes in different communicative stages,further leading to the ratio differences in multimodal deployment and distribution.Secondly,four types of semiotic resources,namely image act,focus,perspective and color are mainly employed to respectively construct dialogic affiliation in light of systems of contact,social distance,attitude and modality.An analysis of intermodal synergies and interactions uncovers that auditory resources make easier cognition to audience in constructing dialogic affiliation while visualization can be the main means.More specifically,the complementary relation of reinforcement and non-reinforcement are reflected most obviously in the discourse.Thirdly,the auditory mode of spoken language takes a highest proportion of deployment among three representative modes,remaining a high and similar proportion in three communicative stages without a large fluctuation.Visual modes of focus and camera angle possess higher modal activity,whose proportions of deployment present a steadily upward trend as the communication proceeds and achieve a peak value in the ending stage.The dynamic multimodal discourse analysis on the documentary film can verify the applicability of the proposed integrated framework in this study to a certain degree,help explain the acquisition of an embodied perception of the authenticity of ICH,and eventually it may provide appropriate references for the production and dissemination of ICH in visualization.