A Multimodal Approach To Attitudinal Meaning In Fairy Tales Discourse

In the past decade, people have become increasingly realized that language is just oneway to generate meaning, for example, when we analyse the static print books, othermodes, such as the layout, illustrations, etc, can also generate meaning. Thus, thetraditional language analysis which takes the language as the only core of discourseanalysis can not fully explain the generating of meaning. Among those multimodal texts,children’s picture books are, in particular, rich in meaning which are realized through thecombination of verbal and visual modes. With the increasing awareness among linguiststhat discourse analysis inevitably involves analyses of meanings arising from thecombination of multiple modes of communication. Recently, the studies on the Appraisalsystem also have begun to analyze other evaluative resources, such as image.Based on the above consideration, this thesis aims at applying the attitude system ofAppraisal Theory and Visual Grammar within the Systemic Functional Linguistics to theanalysis of the Attitudinal Meaning of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland from aMultimodal approach. The research design consists of three sub-studies. First, itinvestigates the attitudinal meaning reflected in the verbal text of Alice’s story. The secondsub-study analyzes how the various visual semiotic resources are deployed to construe the‘emotion and attitude’. Third; it examines the relations between verbal and visual semioticresources in the process of construing the attitudinal meaning in the Alice’s story. Presentstudy explores in detail how the verbal and visual semiotic resources are co-deployed toconstrue attitudinal meaning in multimodal fairy tale discourse. The analysis proves thatFirst，after analyzing the verbal part of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, we canconcluded that the attitudinal meaning of Appreciation and Affect are foregrounded andattitudinal meaning of Judgment are comparatively backgrounded. It due to that Alice’sAdventures in Wonderland lays in setting an example of books for children that arepractically free from the weight of excessive didactics and moral preaching and at the sametime recognize the essential difference between the view a child and a grown-up. Second,after analyzing the visual part of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, we find that not onlythe image can construe the attitudinal meaning, but also the layout, typography andmodality can construe the attitudinal meaning. In the image, the affect meaning is realizedthrough the facial expressions of the characters and exaggerates behavior. The Judgmentalmeaning is realized through human behavior. The Appreciative Meaning is realized through depicting the numerous peculiar speaking creatures and the weird person as aliving material object in terms of their shape, specific arrangement of features and theirclothing or accessories. Third, as for the verbiage-visual relations, i.e. the relations ofco-articulate and the augmentation relations is discussed in the process of construe theattitudinal meaning. It is found that the augmentation relations between the verbal andvisual part of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland play a great role in the process of encodingattitudinal meaning.The implications of this thesis are follows: Firstly, this study analyses the attitudinalmeaning reflected in verbal and visual resources in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,which is a relatively new approach, expands the linguistic framework of Martin&White(2005), explaining how different semiotic resources construct Attitude. Secondly, Ratherthan focusing on attitudinal meaning reflected in the relations of different modalities,This thesis looks into the respective roles and relations of different modalities both inthe collaborated process of making meaning. Besides analyzing attitudinal meaning inchildren Literature from multimodal discourse analysis is rare. Thirdly, the analysis ofthe attitudinal meaning in Alice in Wonderland may help people better understand howattitudinal meaning in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland influence children.