Intersemiotic Complementarity in Tourism Promotional Video About Qingdao

As an important coastal tourist city in China, Qingdao has a pleasant climate, a combination of Chinese and Western cultures, and rich tourism resources. To promote Qingdao as a tourist destination, tourism organizations in Qingdao have launched a series of promotional videos through the Internet, TV and other media, which have become important media for people to know Qingdao. As a multimodal discourse for conveying tourism information, tourism promotional videos integrate sound, text, image and other symbolic resources to establish the city’s destination image. This study aims to investigate the relationship between the verbal and visual modes of the tourism promotional video About Qingdao on YouTube in a multimodal discourse analysis approach to acknowledge how verbal and visual modes work together to construct meanings. The study employs a qualitative research design, and specifically employed Royce’s Intersemiotic Complementarity Framework to analyze the relationship between the verbal texts and visual images of the promotional video About Qingdao. The verbal texts were extracted through NVIVO, and the visual images were obtained via the video editing application Adobe Premiere Pro. The verbal and visual data were analyzed through NVIVO 12 by encoding the participants, processes and circumstances of the clauses and images. The study found that the frequently used ideational intersemiotic relation between visual and verbal modes are repetition and hyponymy. The complementarity of the two modes portrays the positive destination image of Qingdao, thereby publicizing the attractiveness of Qingdao.