Genre and impact captioning in a Korean real-variety show: a systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis

This thesis aims to identify how meaning is made in one popular Korean TV Real Variety Show (RVS) from a systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA) perspective, which has not been widely used in Korean academia. The focus of this paper is on analysis of structure, and impact captions of 3 Meals a Day (3 MaD) season 6. Impact captions (ICs) are new forms of writing on TV entertainment shows. Studies of ICs have continued for a few decades, mostly in Korea and Japan. Yet, this research area is still new to the West both in the TV industry and academia. This paper attempts to contribute to existing IC studies by adding a relatively new perspective, or an SF-MDA perspective, to look into Korean RVSs and ICs. The scope of data in this paper is limited to one season (season 6) out of six for the structure analysis, and four episodes (episode 1, 3, 4, and 5) for the IC analysis. Methodologically, genre theory and systemic functional theory are applied in the analysis of the data. The results of this analysis are summarised in two parts as follows. First, on the basis of the analysis of the structure, there is a functional structure of 3 MaD season 6 which uncovers the relations between each component or stage, and presents how meaning is made through these syntagmatic relations. Second, the analysis of the ICs examines how meaning is made by a selection of systemic choices. This paper identifies system networks of ICs at the level of expression, opening a way to construct system networks at the level of content.