ABSTRACT
Chapter 9 summarizes the analytical tools developed, the major findings, and the outlook on future research by addressing the three respective questions of how, what, and whither, namely (1) How should multimodal Chinese discourse be approached? (2) What key insights have the analyses provided? (3) What is next for multimodal Chinese discourse studies? The answers to the first two questions echo the two outcomes envisaged in Chapter 1, that is, providing new understandings of communication and society in contemporary China, and a set of analytical tools to facilitate such understandings. It argues that multimodal discourse needs to be analyzed within local socio-historical contexts and that different theoretical approaches can be integrated in analyzing multimodal Chinese discourse. It also proposes areas for further studies. A wide range of Chinese discourse can be analyzed from a multimodal perspective, particularly the burgeoning new social and communicative practices engendered by the rapid development of digital technologies. Large-scale multimodal corpora can be compiled, and big data approaches can be adopted for large-scale empirical analysis. Future empirical analysis can also verify, modify, extend, and refine the analytical frameworks developed in this book to investigate more semiotic resources.
