视觉语法视角下电影《人生大事》多模态话语分析

A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of the Film Lighting Up The Stars from the Perspective of Visual Grammar

多模态话语分析方法在二十世纪九十年代出现,将话语分析研究范畴扩展到除文字以外的多模态文本。电影海报、镜头和画面包含文字、图像、色彩等多种形式,具有多模态属性。Kress和Van Leeuwen将Halliday的系统功能语法扩展到了视觉模式,创立了视觉语法体系,认为图像中的视觉符号不仅可以反映客观世界和主观世界发生的事件,而且可以表现各种各样的人际关系。该研究把语法延伸到了视觉层面,构建了以“再现意义”、“互动意义”、“结图意义”为核心的解析图象的视觉语法体系。本文以电影《人生大事》为例,选取了《人生大事》电影海报及电影中具有代表性的镜头和画面,从以上三个层面对电影进行了细致的剖析和阐释。研究结果表明电影海报及画面是由文字、图像、色彩等不同社会符号互相作用来构建意义的。本研究证实了多模态话语分析方法对电影文本的可操作性,研究成果有助于了解多模态语篇中的意义构建。

Multimodal discourse analysis emerged in the 1990s, which has expanded the research scope of discourse analysis to the field of multimodal text. Film posters, shots and scenes contain forms of text, image and color and thus, are multimodal in nature. Kress and Van Leeuwen extend Halliday’s systematic functional grammar to visual modal and propose a visual grammar system. They suggest that visual symbols in images could not only reflect events in the objective and subjective world, but also represent various interpersonal relationships. Their research extends “grammar” to visual system and constructs a visual grammar system which interprets images based on “representational meaning”, “interactive meaning” and “compositional meaning”. This paper, taking the film poster, representative shots and scenes of Lighting Up The Stars as an example, explores the meaning construction from the above-mentioned three aspects. The result shows that meanings in the poster and scenes are constructed through the interaction of different social symbols such as text, image and color in the film. This research proves the applicability of multimodal discourse analysis on film, results of the present research may contribute to the understanding of meaning construction in multimodal text.