A Discourse Analysis Of "Chinese Government Website Microblog" In 2019 From Multimodal Perspective

Chinese Government Website Microblog(CGW Microblog)is an official social media account hosted by the general office of the State Council and operates on the Sina Weibo platform.It releases the State Council’s major decision-making and important policy documents,important meetings and other government affairs information promptly.The account provides a new way for the publicity of the government image and a new channel for communication between the government and the people.In 2019,it posted 2592 microblogs,with the number of fans reaching nearly 19 million.However,domestic research on such an important official media is far from adequate.In this thesis,50 microblogs of people’s livelihood published by the CGW microblog are randomly selected as the research materials.Based on the theory of three meta-functions in systemic functional linguistics and the relevant theories of visual grammar,this thesis tries to analyze the proportion,characteristics,functions and interrelations of language and nonlanguage modes in microblogs.It is expected to help enrich the multimodal research in the field of government microblog and expand the research scope of CGW microblog.There are four major findings in this thesis.Firstly,the main modal types of CGW microblog are language,picture and video,in which language mode accounts for the largest proportion.Every mode is integrated with each other.Secondly,from the perspective of the transitivity of experiential function,the material process has the dominant position.The proportion of existential and psychological processes is 0%.From the perspective of interpersonal function,declarative sentences and imperative sentences are most frequently used.A small number of questions are used to attract readers’ interest in reading.From the perspective of thematic progression of discourse function,the "T1 → T2" progression mode is often used.Commonly,multiple predicates use one subject together,and the subject is mostly the functional department of the government.This is also related to its fundamental purpose--to release government information.Thirdly,from the perspective of the representational meaning,pictures enable readers to gain a simple overall impression with a small amount of cognition.From the point of view of interactive significance,the photos often like to use head up and medium distance to shape the characters.From the perspective of composition meaning,photographic pictures often express meaning through space and position,while caricatures often use colour and size to highlight the text content.Fourthly,the picture,video mode and text mode establish intertextuality.But in this process,the explanation function of image and video mode is in the first place,and the aesthetic function is in the second place.Their information value is often very low.In many cases,image and video modes are adjuncts of language mode.Finally,this thesis suggests that the proportion of language mode in picture and video mode can be reduced,and some short videos can be added in the form of expression.This may be able to play a better communication effect.