商业演讲的多模态语篇分析 ——以 iPhone 5C 发布会为例

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION

1.1 Research Background

The modern society is packed with communications. When fulfilling a job, no matter what  the  profession  is,  and  no matter  how  much  a  man  knows  about  his  job, specialized knowledge alone is far from enough to guarantee success. Communication skills are critical in everyday life, so on the list of the importance of various factors in recruiting someone, communication skills are ranked on the top. It is especially true in business. Along with the deepening of economic globalization, economic cooperation and communication is ubiquitous. At present, most business cooperation is achieved by interpersonal  communications,  so  the  use  of  effective  and  efficient  language  in business field has been regarded as a critical skill for the success of business. 

Among various forms of business communication, business presentations play a key role in business activities. As Wikipedia explains, a presentation is the process of presenting a topic to audience. In business environment, it is typically a demonstration, lecture, or speech about a product, a proposal or simply some ideas. To ensure better communicative effects,  multimedia  devices  are  frequently  uses  in  business presentations.

In  the  era  of  the  multimedia,  it  sees  an  increasing  awareness  that  meaning  is hardly  made  by  language alone. The  media  and  modes  for  communication  have changed greatly. People communicate through various kinds of modes simultaneously, such  as  space,  gestures,  gaze,  posture,  motion,  sound,  tone  of  voice,  music, three-dimension objects, oral, written, image, tables, diagrams, pictures, etc.( Baldry &  Thibault，2006).   Each  of  them  is considered  as  an  independent  mode  of communication and with all the modes integrated, communication is enhanced. 

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1.2 Objectives and Significance of the Research

By  analyzing  a  business  presentation  from  Apple,  the  research  aims  to  discover  the characteristics  of  linguistic, visual  and  auditory  semiotics  in  modern  business presentations,  and  explore  how  the  interpersonal  function, interactive  meaning  and speech emotion exchange realized respectively by different semiotics. 

By doing this, the research ultimate targets to help business presenters improve their speeches as well as other supporting facilities such as body language, PPT and audios. This thesis would hopefully shed some light on how to conduct good business presentations in modern times.

The significance of the present research can be illustrated from the following two aspects.  Firstly,  theoretical  significance is  intended  to  be  presented  as  references  to later researches. Through a brief literature review, it can be found that there are rare multimodal  researches  on  business  presentations.  In  this  research,  characteristics  of linguistic, visual and  auditory  semiotics  are  studied  by  analyzing  a  typical  business presentation.  Qualitative  and  quantitative methods  will  be  applied  and  the  findings can be of some help to future researches.

Further, this study has practical significance by giving suggestions on the topic of  business  communication.  This  study aims  to  analyze  a  typical  multimodal discourse and find out how different resources interplay with the other to realize the interaction  in  business.  Thus,  the  study  can  achieve  the  objective  of  enlightening business  operators  of  the meaning-making  processes  so  as  to  improve  their multimodal  discourse  literacy.  By  enhancing  communicative effects,  it  will  bring economic  benefits  for  companies,  especially  in  the  context  of  a  gloomy  global economy.

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CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 General Introduction to Mode and Modality

According  to  Forceville  (2009:22),  mode  can  be  simply  defined  as  “interpretable semiotic  system  through specific perception  process”.  In  this  way  classification  of mode  can  be  related  to  five  perception  processes,  i.e.  1) image  and  visual  mode;  2) sound  and  auditory  mode;  3)  olfactory  mode;  4)  gustatory  mode;  5)  tactile mode. However,  under  real-scene  communication circumstances,  communication  forms  are often mixed up with modes. For example, both written language and gesture belong to visual  mode;  oral  language,  music  and  other  kinds  of  sound all  belong to  auditory mode.

Multimodality is a term brought up by discourse analysts and widely discussed by  linguists  and  semioticians  in  recent years.  It  is  consistent  with  the  new development of discourse and is used to emphasize the importance of the research of semiotics apart from verbal text, such as those different modes defined above. That is to say, multimodality is an integrated whole with two or more modes intertwining and interacting  with  each  other.  Lemke  (1998)  further explains  that  “the  result  of multimodal  semiosis  is  multiplicative”,  rather  than  a  simple  addition  of  meaning  of different modes. Some other scholars also pose their own way of explaining the term “Multimodality”. Van Leeuwen defines it as: “Multimodality means the combination of different semiotic modes – for example, language and music – in a communicative artifact or event”. (2005:281)”

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2.2 Review of Researches on MDA

As mentioned above, many scholars pay close attention to MDA in the recent twenty years. The scholars study MDA in many disciplinary fields within different schools of linguistics.  However,  among  the  many  schools  of  linguistics,  the MDA  from  the socio-semiotic  approach  becomes  the  main  stream  which  is  the  general  view  of systemic functional linguistics. Systemic functional linguistics developed by Michael Hailliday  (1978,  1994)  and  extended  by Martin  (2002),  sees  language  as  social “semiotic”  (Halliday,  1989)  and  makes  four  claims  concerning  language. That  is “functional”  in  terms  of  what  it  can  do  or  what  can  be  done  with  it.  “Semantic”  is used to construe meanings. “Contextual” for these meanings are influenced by social and cultural context in which they are changed. And “semiotic” is a process of making meanings by selecting from the total set of options that constitute what can be meant (Halliday, 2007). 

Halliday (1978) has claimed that “the grammar of a language is not a code, not a set of rules for producing correct sentences, but a resource for making meanings.” As a resource, a meaning potential, language is defined as a multi semiotic system that includes  context,  semantics  and  lexicogrammar,  and  phonology  or  graphology  in linguistic terms.  Halliday  makes  out  “three  kinds  of  meaning  that  are  embodied  in human  as  a  whole,  forming  the basis  of  the  semiotic  organization  of  all  natural languages” (Halliday, 1985). 

Pioneering  works  of  applying  systemic-functional  theories  to  visual  images, architectures and sculptures include O’Toole’s (1994) The Language of Displayed Art and Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996) Reading Images. Following these works, further applications  of  systematic  functional  grammar  to  other  semiotic  resources  can  be found  in  the analysis  of  multimodal  discourses  in  mathematics,  science,  and three-dimensional  museum  displays.  The innovative  works  have  provided  insights into the nature of intra-semiosis-meaning within different semiotic resources, as well as  inter-semiosis-meaning  across  different  semiotic  resources  (Baldry  and  Thibaut, 2006; Lemke, 1998; O’Halloran, 1999; Royce, 1998)

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CHPTER THREE THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ................ 13

3.1 Interpersonal Function in Language ................. 13

3.1.1Mood System ............. 14

3.1.2 Modality System .............. 16

CHAPTER FOUR ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSIONS ............... 33

4.1 Methodology ................... 33

4.2 Data Collection ........... 33

CHAPTER FIVE CONCLUSION ................ 59

5.1 A summary of Major Findings ................. 59 

5.2 Implications of the Study ............ 60

CHAPTER FOUR ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSIONS

4.1 Methodology

Scientific methodologies are critical to academic researches. The present study adopts quantitative  and  qualitative methods  and  collects  political  speeches  and  business presentations from other companies to conduct comparison in the process.

The  first  phase  aims  to  explore  the  features  of  three  typical  semiotic  patterns used in this genre with contractive, quantitative and qualitative methods. The second phase,  in  sector  4.4,  aims  to  investigate  how  the different  modes  interact  and cooperate  with  each  other  to  make  business  presentations  more  persuasive  by analyzing the research results investigated in previous part.

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CHAPTER FIVE CONCLUSION

5.1 A Summary of Major Findings

In response of the three research questions, we summarize our findings of the research as follows. 

Firstly,  in  the  multimodal  discourse  of  business  presentations,  interpersonal function  is  realized  mainly  by  verbal linguistic  semiotics,  but  its  dominance  is weakened  by  the  integration  of  other  modals  in  communication.  The language featured  by  plain  and  objective  mood  and  modality,  has  created  a  sincere communication. 

Secondly,  interactive  meaning  of  the  visual  contact  is  realized  by  frame, perspective and other technical device of the camera. Most of the images are offering information with close-up frame, eye-level perspective and high modality of colors. 

Thirdly, the non-verbal auditory semiotics cooperates closely with language and images  in  terms  of  speed  and rhythm.  As  for  speech  emotions,  positive  and  neutral emotions  are  widely  used  in  business  communications, which  makes  the  speaker approachable and convincing. 

Finally,  it  can  be  generalized  that  the  business  multimodal  discourse  is dominated  by  verbal  speech  with  multi modals  function  simultaneously.  The integration  of  different  semiotics  enhances  the  credibility,  efficiency  and interactive effect of the communication. Therefore, to maximize the interaction between business spokesman  and  the customers,  it  is  recommended  that  business  presentations appropriately allocate different semiotics according to our findings.

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