SEEING THE LAW: A STUDY ON MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF CHINESE PLE SHORT VIDEOS

Abstract

In the digital age, short videos have brought a new form of public legal education (PLE) due to its wide reach and rich multimodal resources. In China, this medium has become an increasingly powerful tool to disseminate legal knowledge to the public, particularly to college students who are digital netizens but lack legal awareness. Against this background, this study investigates the features of meaning-making and inter-semiotic relations between verbal and visual semiotic resources in anti-fraud short videos. A semiotic framework is constructed by integrating the concept of transitivity from Systemic Functional Linguistics, with representational processes from Visual Grammar. Data for this study comprised of 3768 frames that were annotated and coded using Elan, a software of annotating audio and video files with multiple time-aligned tiers. The subsequent analysis of the frames revealed that material processes in verbal resources and reactional accompanying speech and mental processes in the visual are mainly employed to encode the real world, as a way to construct warning and persuasive information. Image subordination to the text in the status and locution and extension in the logic-semantic enable the verbal and visual resources to work together to present the real-world examples vividly and enhance viewers’ engagement. However, in the short video, the over-reliance of the image on the text also weakens the potential for multimodal synergy. Findings from this study contribute to providing practical strategies to optimize the use of multimodality for PLE in the digital age.