An Analysis Of The Economist's Chinese Theme Covers(1978-2019)In The Perspective Of Multimodal Theory

With non-linguistic symbols such as pictures,music and colors playing an increasingly prominent role in discourse meaning construction and interpersonal communication,the single mode dominated by language in the past has been unable to meet the needs of the time.Multimodal discourse analysis comes into being and provides a new perspective for people to understand the colorful symbolic system.Based on Kress and Van Leeuwen's visual grammar theory and Forceville's multimodal metaphor,this paper takes 105 Chinese theme covers of The Economist from 1978 to 2019 as the research subject through the combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods to make one in-depth analysis.The author finds that meaning of representation,interaction and composition in visual grammar are connected with each other.As for representation meaning,Chinese theme covers mainly adopt the action process and reaction process in narrative representation,as well as the symbolic process in conceptual representation.As for interactive meaning,Chinese theme covers tend to provide information directly to readers,and use the combination of near and far shots to express the contradictory relationship between the West and China,which seems both close and distant.Besides,they tend to show the interactive significance with high modality of red background.As for composition meaning,Chinese theme covers tend to employ the top and down structure to reflect the information value,and tend to use the foreground and large layout to reflect the importance on China.In terms of multimodal metaphor,the Economist uses the representation of source domain mapping target domain to reveal the metaphor mechanism.There are three representations of multimodal metaphor in Chinese themes covers : source domain image-target text,source-domain image-target implicit,source domain text-target implicit.By selecting familiar sources in the West,the Economist constructs different metaphorical scenes with metaphor mechanism,which implies the magazine's attitude towards China.By systematically analyzing the process of visual construction and multimodal metaphor construction of the Economist's Chinese theme covers,this paper reveals to some extent the cognitive attitude of the western society towards China.As a tentative study,this paper attempts to explain the applicability of visual grammar and multimodal metaphor in multimodal magazine covers,to broaden the research field of multimodal discourse analysis,and to enhance viewers' ability to read multimodal metaphors on magazine covers.