A Comparative Study On Image Constructing Of Chinese And American University Publicity Videos From The Perspective Of Multimodal Discourse Analysis

This thesis attempts to compare the image constructing of University of Chinese Academy of Sciences(UCAS)and Cornell University(Cornell)through a multimodal discourse analysis on verbal modality,visual modality and relationships between different modalities in publicity videos of two universities,based on an integrated theoretical frame of "meta-functions","Visual Grammar" and Zhang Delu’s "synthetic theoretical framework".For data processing,ELAN,with labeling and statistical functions,is used to describe the general distribution of various modalities in two videos.The findings can be summarised in two aspects:First,both universities pay more attention to the presentation of soft power rather than hard power.Furthermore,for factors of soft power,UCAS emphasizes the presentation of international projects,while Cornell highlights the presence of excellent faculty resources.Second,the relationship between different modalities in two videos all belongs to complementary type.Specifically,third-person narration(a voice-over)and corresponding content picture matching are preferred in the video of UCAS,whereas in the video of Cornell,first-person voice and picture content usually occur simultaneously in the interviews to teachers and students from different disciplines and backgrounds.The constructed image of UCAS appears to be more objective and cautious,while the image of Cornell seems rather subjective and open.This can be attributed to two aspects of the cultural differences between the two countries:firstly,China tends to place more emphasis on a collective consciousness,whereas the US stresses more on an individual consciousness.Secondly,China tends to be more interested in the presentation of objective results,while the US places a higher value on the representation of subjective processes.