Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Documentary The Frontline:China’s Fight Against COVID-19

The Frontline:China ’s Fight Against COVID-19 is an English panoramic documentary on anti-epidemic launched by China Global Television Network.This documentary traces the progress from the lockdown of Wuhan to the containment of the outbreak,telling the world the heroic stories of frontline medical staff and ordinary people.It is a typical dynamic multimodal discourse by using multiple symbolic resources such as language,images and sounds to construct meaning.Based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics,Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar and Van Leeuwen’s Auditory Grammar,this thesis analyzes how verbal,visual and auditory modalities construct meaning and how to construct meaning among them..When the documentary discourse The Frontline:China’s Fight Against COVID-19 conveys ideational function on the level of verbal modality,the clauses of verbal process and material process account for the highest proportion;as for interpersonal function,declarative mood is mainly used and affirmative forms of low and medium value modal verbs are used most frequently;the theme and rheme of the documentary discourse are interrelated in form and meaning,making.the documentary more coherent and logical.On the level of visual modality,38 representative shots are selected.It can be found out that narrative process in the representational meaning can effectively present the truth of the event and show the power of China in fighting the epidemic.In the expression of interactive meaning,the lens changing with the scene is conducive to drawing closer to the participants and arousing the emotional resonance between the characters and the audience.In terms of compositional meaning,the"left-to-right" and "center-to-margin" layouts are arranged to highlight the "new" and"important" information conveyed by the documentary.On the level of auditory modality,a section of voice-over,two pieces of background music,two parts of dialogue of President Xi and two parts of dialogue between volunteers and citizens are selected.The research finds background music and environment sound work together to highlight the theme and reinforce the context;the volume and pitch of the dialogue can reflect the social distance.With respect to the synthetic analysis of the modalities,three scenes combining multiple modalities are selected,and the study finds that verbal,visual and auditory modalities work together to build the overall meaning and present a complementary relationship.Through both reinforced and non-reinforced relationships,the scene is more realistic and the meaning is more comprehensive.This study provides a new perspective for audiences to interpret documentary discourse,which helps them to interpret how various semiotic resources in documentaries construct meaning and thus better understanding multimodal discourse.