| With advancing reform and opening-up across the board,China has made huge achievements and increasingly become an indispensable member of the world.Therefore,the issue of shaping China’s image has received a great attention.The national media has been shouldering the mission of national internal and external publicity.Furthermore,China’s foreign journal,as an influential tool for international publicity,plays a pivotal role in shaping China’s image.China Pictorial,as a state-level comprehensive monthly English magazine with pictures,texts and color,serves the mission to tell China’s stories to the world.It has strong applicability to take Visual Grammar as a theoretical framework.This thesis selects 68 covers of China Pictorial from 2017 to 2022 as the research object,adopts Visual Grammar of Multimodal Discourse Analysis as the research framework and analyzes the distribution characteristics of representation meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning in image,exploring construction of image meaning by taking specific pictures as cases.And then revealing national image of China abroad that it has shaped and spread.Through statistical analysis,it is noted that conceptual representation occupies a large proportion in the cover of China Pictorial,especially highly frequency of symbolic process.Some Chinese elements such as panda,dragon,national flag of China,and the Forbidden City are used to show the image of China with a long history and culture.In terms of interactive meaning,since magazine is known for depicting the great rivers,mountains and cultural customs of the motherland,most of the covers adopt the image with offer act and high modality as well as long shot,frontal angle and high angel,so that the viewer can objectively understand the meaning conveyed by the image.From the perspective of compositional meaning,the top-bottom structure and foreground are often used to highlight the information value.Finally,it is found that the cover of China Pictorial has shaped a positive and objective national image of China in hard power and soft power.Economically,it solves existing economic problems with an open and innovative attitude and has a positive impact on world development.Developing state-ofart technology,serving and protecting the people in technology and military.Meanwhile,it has shaped a cultural image with rich and eclectic culture.Politically,it has a pragmatic,efficient government and progressive,amiable national leaders.Moreover,it has built a united,brave and confident national image in people’s livelihood.Furthermore,the image of united and progressive in national and regional development has established in the image.Ecologically,China adheres to take the path of green and sustainable development in ecological environment.Moreover,China attaches great importance on education equity and supports education in poverty-stricken areas.Diplomatically,it has shaped a national image of diplomatic independence and friendly cooperation with other countries.Finally,an open and inclusive national image in sports has shaped in front covers.This thesis aims to enrich the research genre of Multimodal Discourse Analysis and enhances the applicability of magazine cover research,so as to help readers better understand the meaning construction of national image.It is also beneficial for magazine cover designers to pay more attention to the shaping of national image. |
