Visual Narrative: Multimodal Discourse Construction on Sustainable Development Video for Beijing Winter Olympics

Abstract

Sustainable development (SD) has become a major concern in recent decades and sports mega-events (SMEs) such as the Olympic Games are considered an important way for host countries to convey their concepts, policies, and measures of SD. This paper takes the official video of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics (BWO) named Sustainability for the Future as the corpus and intends to analyze the multimodal constructions of the SD concept of the BWO from a Meta-functional approach, including interpersonal meaning, ideational meaning, and layout, based on the framework of the Visual Narrative Theory (VNT). The results show that four types of discourse are applied to this video, succeeding in constructing a green, sharing, open, and honest SD concept of the BWO and shaping the image of China as an environmental-friendly and responsible host country. Furthermore, characteristics of the construction of the SD discourse of SMEs are fully discussed in this paper. This research is a profound application of the multimodal discourse(MD) analytic approach to the SD discourse from the perspective of the VNT and it also provides valuable reference and inspiration for host countries of SMEs in the future to improve their official communication level and convey the SD concepts to the outside world in the cyber world.