| Author: | Li, Enyao |
| Title: | Multimodality, social media and university branding : a social semiotic analysis of Chinese universities’ identity construction on Weibo |
| Advisors: | Feng, Dezheng William (ENGL) |
| Degree: | DALS |
| Year: | 2023 |
| Subject: | Sociolinguistics Discourse analysis Social media Education, Higher -- China -- Marketing Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations |
| Department: | Faculty of Humanities |
| Pages: | ix, 249 pages : color illustrations |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | Market forces have increasingly influenced higher education all over the world over the past decades. In this global context, universities are confronted with great challenges and fierce competition, and China is no exception. In order to promote their identities and enhance their competitiveness, Chinese universities have adopted various branding strategies, particularly on social media platforms. The present study carries out a social semiotic analysis of Chinese universities’ identity construction on Weibo within the framework of register typology (Matthiessen, 2009, 2015; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014) which differentiates seven primary types of socio-semiotic processes, i.e. expounding, reporting, recreating, sharing, enabling, recommending, and exploring. The data of this study consists of 1035 Weibo posts collected from nine influential official Weibo of Chinese universities in 2018. Through analysing the socio-semiotic processes represented in the Weibo posts, this study identifies three major socio-semiotic processes and their content. Specifically, the shared content includes sharing life philosophy, practical tips, professional knowledge, audio and video resources, campus culture, and best wishes. In reporting processes, the content is mainly about reporting on talent cultivation, academic research, social responsibility, official notice, university reputation, and international cooperation. In enabling processes, the followers are enabled to take part in activities or events related to campus life, life experience, and learning life. In terms of interdiscursive mixture, the sharing process can be mixed with recommending, enabling, recreating, and exploring; the reporting process can be mixed with sharing, recommending, enabling, and exploring; the enabling process can be mixed with recreating, sharing, and recommending. In the present study, all the university Weibo posts of socio-semiotic processes are multimodally realized, including three aspects, namely linguistic realization, visual realization, and hypertextual realization. In the linguistic realization, the posts can be realized through the use of address forms, netspeak words, and interactive sentences. In terms of visual realization, the posts employ visual images (photos, stock images, textual images, long images, screenshots, and dynamic images), emojis, and Internet memes. In the hypertextual realization, the posts can be realized by the use of hashtags, @sign, hyperlinks, locations, and super topics. Based on the aforementioned research results and analysis, it can be summarized that universities in China have constructed their identities as student-centred, research-intensive, service-oriented, and internationalized institutions on social media Weibo. And these identities reflect the socio-political, socio-economic, socio-cultural, and socio-technical contexts in contemporary China. The present study can make both theoretical and practical contributions to multimodal discourse analysis as well as communication studies. Theoretically, the social semiotic analysis can provide a systematic study of the under-explored institutional identity on social media and thereby expand the scope of multimodal discourse studies. In practice, this research can make universities understand what identities they have constructed so as to help them get prepared to deal with fierce competition in the context of globalization and marketization. More importantly, this study could provide an insightful perspective on the understanding of university branding on social media in the Chinese context. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | restricted access |
Files in This Item:
| File | Description | Size | Format | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7075.pdf | For All Users (off-campus access for PolyU Staff & Students only) | 12.24 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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