An Analysis of Transitivity and Visual Mode in Science Documentary: A Case Study of War of the Galaxies

This article studies the cooperation of verbal mode and visual mode in science documentaries, and analyzes how the goal of offering science knowledges to the audience with few educational backgrounds in such field can be realized through the cooperation. With the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Grammar and Visual Grammar, strategies applied to the visual mode for interpreting the transitivity constructed in the verbal mode in the documentary War of the Galaxies are analyzed. In conclusion, the visual mode in War of the Galaxies contributes to maximizing the function of transitivity in this documentary, in terms of giving definitions, displaying discovery results, and making comparisons between different objects in the way that audience are easier to accept. The analysis demonstrates the importance of the cooperation of verbal and visual modes when a science documentary tries to influence the audience’s way of thinking. As a result, this article illustrates the importance of cooperating with language and image during the process of public education.