Abstract:In recent years, with the development of multi-media, the social and cultural discourses have appeared to be more and more complex. Language is no longer the only way to construct meanings. Images, sounds, gestures and other communicating modes are also no longer paralanguages in our communication, but form a wider resource group with language to construct meanings together. This thesis tries to conduct multi-modal discourse analysis on a French advertisement, Dreamcard, on the basis of Visual Grammar, put forward by Kress and Van Leeuwen. It aims not only to show the function of conveying meaning by languages and images together, as social symbols, but also help the readers to strengthen their abilities of recognizing multi-modal discourse. This thesis can be divided into four parts. In the first part, it briefly introduces the background of the research and the concept of multi-modal discourse. In the second part, it describes those researching results of scholars in this field, overseas and home, in today’s world. The third part is a concrete case study on the basis of multi-modal discourse analysis. In the fourth part, it reviews the whole thesis and analyzes the significance and the deficiency of this study.

Keywords:  multi-modal discourse analysis; social symbols; Dreamcard

Contents

Abstract

中文摘要

Chapter 1 Introduction-1

1.1 Background of this research-1

1.2 the concept of multi-modal discourse analysis-1

Chapter 2 The General Development Course of Multi-modal Discourse Analysis-3

2.1 Relavent researches overseas-3

2.2 Relevant researches at home-3

Chapter 3 Case Study-4

3.1 The background of this poster-4

3.2 Reproduction and interaction of advertising images and text-5

3.3 Three kinds of significances in images-5

3.3.1 Significance in the reproduction of the images-5

3.3.2 Significance in the interaction of the images-6

3.3.3 Significance of the composition of images-7

3.4 Significance in functional grammar of the slogan-8

Chapter 4 The significance and deficiency of this research-9

4.1 The significance-9

4.2 The deficiency-10

References-11