Abstract
The development of new media enlarges the repertoire of semantic resources in creating a discourse. Apart from language, visual and sound symbols can all become semantic sources, and a synergy of different modality and symbols can be used to complete argumentative reasoning and evaluation. In the framework of multimodal argumentation and appraisal theory, this study conducted quantitative and multimodal discourse analysis on a new media discourse Building a community of shared future for humankind and found that visual symbols can independently fulfill both reasoning and evaluation in the argumentative discourse. An interplay of multiple modalities constructs a multi-layered semantic source, with verbal subtitles as a frame and a sound system designed to reinforce the theme and mood. In addition, visual modality is implicit in constructing the stance and evaluation of the discourse, with the verbal mode playing the role of “anchoring,” i.e. providing explicit explanation. A synergy of visual, acoustic, and verbal modalities could effectively transmit conceptual, interpersonal, and discursive meanings, but the persuasive result with the audience from different cultural backgrounds might be mixed.
About the author
Ting Wu (b. 1978) is Associate Professor at the School of Foreign Languages, Southeast University, Nanjing, China. Her research is in second language acquisition and multimodal discourse analysis. Her publications include: “A probe into two micro-lecture videos: A systemic-functional approach to intersemiosis analysis in multimodal discourse” (2017), “On correlation between teachers’ discipline strategies and college students’ willingness to communicate in English” (2016), and “On the communication of Chinese discourse acts from the moral perspective” (2015).
Acknowledgement
The research for this paper was financially supported by the Jiangsu Social Science Fund Project, grant no. 18YYB001 and the “13th Five-Year Plan” Jiangsu Education Science Planning Key Project, grant no. C-a/2016/01/28.
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