A Study Of Multimodal Definition In Advanced English Learner’s Dictionaries

Along with the increase of multimodal discourses in our daily lives, thedefinition mode of a dictionary also tends to be multimodal. Take a look at theEnglish learner’s dictionaries published in recent years, we found more and moredictionaries are furnished with pictorial illustrations to diversify the definition modes,which greatly increases the visualization and readability of the dictionary definition.In multimodal English learner’s dictionaries, verbal text and pictorial illustrationrepresent the main form of the multimodal text. Thus, the relationship between worddefinition and pictorial illustration is no longer the one that is unilaterally dependent,or pictorial illustration plays an assistant role in dictionary definition. Therefore,confronted with the question of the treatment that text definition and illustrationdefinition are separated in previous studies: on one hand, emphasize the importanceof texts but ignore the function of illustrations; on the other hand, highlight themulti-functions of illustrations but neglect the essential part of texts, this paper willdo an in-depth survey of the treatment of word-image definition entries based onOxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (OALD,8thed.), Longman Dictionary ofCotemporary English (LDOCE,4thed.), and Cambridge International Dictionary ofEnglish (CIDE) under the guidance of multimodal theory within the framework ofSystemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The focus of this study is to explore thesimilarities and differences of the image-word definition entries in the threedictionaries, and to find out the image-word definition modes in multimodal Englishlearner’s dictionaries. Both quantitative study and qualitative study are adopted inthis study.The final results of this research show that nouns, verbs, adjectives and phrasesare the main words to be illustrated in current advanced ELDs. Narrative images tendto illustrate verbs, verbal phrases and some nouns depicting event, while conceptualimages are often employed to explain the meaning of nouns and adjectives. Six relations between word definition and pictures are found, including enumerativerelation, metonymous relation, categorical relation, cause and effect relation,elaborative relation and discriminative relation. The multimodal definition modescontain “phrase+picture”,“sentence+picture” and “phrase+sentence+picture”.This study can not only expand the application of multimodal discourse analysis(MAD), but also provide some guidance to the multimodal definition in advancedELDs in the future.