Multimodal Discourse Analysis of “Union Is Strength” from the Perspective of Visual Grammar

As a typical multimodal discourse, a video can construct its meaning through various modalities, such as image, sound, action, and language. From the perspective of systemic functional grammar, taking the visual grammar of Kress & van Leeuwen as the theoretical framework, this paper analyzes the multimodal video “Union Is Strength” from the representational meaning, interactional meaning and compositional meaning, and discusses the meaning construction of the multimodality such as image and speech. The study has found that the video constructs union is strength in a variety of narrative ways, and union can realize the theme significance of the weak winning over the strong.