pable of comprehending different modes and the relationship between them inwebpage. What’s more, the exploration of China Culture may provide certaintheoretical basis for the design of other cultural publicity websites and giveenlightenment for the designers.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Overview of Multimodal Discourse Analysis
In the past decade, multimodal discourse analysis, as a new mode of discourseanalysis, booms and develops in the west world. The previous studies on discourseanalysis mainly either consider the language as the object of study or explore thelanguage application rules from the perspective of language system and the semanticstructure itself, or study its relation to society culture and cognitive psychology.Other meaning-expressing forms, such as image, sound, color and animation are notincluded into consideration. The researchers think that other semiotic resources arefunctional and symbolic just as language and they all belong to social semioticresources as well. Based on the theory of functional linguistics, multimodal discourseanalysis attempts to apply the method of language study to some other semioticresources (such as facial expression, gesture, image, music, etc.). Thus, it overcomesthe traditionally limited attention to the language system and semantic structure itself.It serves as an approach to break the barrier in research between language and society,culture and cognitive psychology. The rise of multimodal discourse analysis providesa new way for analyzing the discourse composed of various semiotics. It helps thereaders understand how different modes, as social semiotics, work together andconstruct meaning. It plays a positive role in improving people’s ability to interpretmultimodality.
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2.2 Previous Studies of Multimodal DiscourseAnalysis
AnalysisOne of the early researchers in multimodal discourse analysis is R. Barthes, whopublished Rhetoric of the image in 1977 in which he discussed the interactionbetween meaning expression of image and language. O’Toole’s The Language ofDisplayed Art (1994) and Kress & van Leeuwen’s Reading Images (1996) havemarked the establishment of this field. The former one attempts to apply functionallinguistic theory to art analysis; while the latter one puts forward a comprehensive andsystematic explanation of the grammar of visual design which leads to profoundinfluence in the field of doing multimodal discourse analysis.Kress and van Leeuwen (1996; 2001; 2003) study the relationship withinmodality and media. They explore multimodal phenomenon expressing meaningregularly, including color grammar, visual image, the layout design of newspaper andfunction of various medias. Baldry (2000) studies multimediality and its use in the ageof distance learning. Leeuwen and Jewitt (2000) publish the Handbook of VisualDesign, which introduces the visual analysis in anthropology, cultural studies,psychological treatment, ethnographic research, the film and television works and soon. Kress et al. (2001) show their interests in multimodal teaching and learning in thescience classroom. Royce, T. (2002) studies on the complementarities of differentsymbols in the multimodal discourse as well as multimodal cooperatives in the classof second language teaching. Lemke (2002) studies hypermodality. Kress (2003)looks at literacy in the new media age. Scollon and Scollon (2003) examine themeanings of signs in the material world. O’Halloran, K. L. (2004) not only studies the construction of multimodal t
