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CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Research
Language is an important part of our lives. Many scholars have been studyinglanguage for a long time, which is the dominant expression of meaning. Discourseanalysis theory was put forward by Harris in the early 1950s. It is concerned withlanguage and the relations between language and context in which it lies. Since then,discourse analysis has become a hot point of research. People produce texts to get amessage across, to express ideas and beliefs, to explain something, to get other peopleto do certain things. We can refer to this complex of communicative purposes as thediscourse that underlines the text and motivates its production in the first place.Scholars all around the world came up with theories and methods from differentperspectives.However, with the rapid development of society, technology and the mass media,the simple texts cannot satisfy the needs of readers. Many other multimodal modes likeimages, colors, sounds and actions come into exist to express meaning. Lim (2004, P.52) said that we live in a multimodal society. Thus, it is necessary to change frommonomodality to multimodality. Social semiologists argue that except language, othersemiotic systems are also the source of meaning. Multimodality refers to the variousways in which a number of distinct semiotic resource systems are both co-deployed andco-contextualized in the making of a text-specific meaning' (Baldry & Thibau It, 2006,P. 21). Multimodal discourse analysis aims to explore the correlation and integration ofthe representational, interactive and textual meanings realized by different semioticresources. People gradually realize the importance of multimodal discourse, andcategorize it as a separate academic field to carry out research.
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1.2 Research Purpose and Significance
Winter Olympic emblems consist of images, words, colors, etc. which are typicalmultimodal discourses according to Kress and Van Leeuwen's Visual Grammar (VG)(1996, 2006). This study chooses Winter Olympic emblems as objects of multimodaldiscourse analysis and aims to put forward a model for the analysis of these emblems.It hopes to shed further light on the research of multimodal discourse analysis.We can discuss the significance of this study from the theoretical perspective andthe practical perspective.In terms of theoretical significance, what should be taken into consideration first isKress and Van Leeuwen. This study could expand the definition of discourse and enrichour comprehension on MDA by integrating language and other meaning resources.Second, through the research process, we could verify the feasibility and practicabilityof applying Visual Grammar into appreciating the meaning of Winter Olympic emblems.Third, by interpreting the relationship between language and other modality forms, thisstudy provides support for the future study on discourse analysis of emblems.As for the practical significance, by integrating various social semiotics includingimages, colors and words, this research provides a new angle for interpreting the designof emblems. It could help readers better understand the social meanings and functionsof language as well as multimodal modes. In addition, the proposal of the model,suitable for the multimodal discourse analysis of emblems, provides a morecomprehensive perspective of appreciating emblems by analyzing the integrated effectsof different