| With the development of discourse analysis, people begin to realize that it is difficult to make a further and comprehensive study on discourse only from perspective of verbal mode. Since more social semiotics get involved in analysis of the meaning of discourse, verbal mode is not the only element that plays an important role in communication any more. So, multimodal discourse analysis began to emerge and develop quickly since 1990 s. Based on the achievements that are made by previous scholars in multimodal discourse analysis, the study on Pearl S. Buck’s children’s stories from perspective of MDA is made in order to deal with three issues:First is to discover the features and functions of the verbal resources in Yu Lan;Second is to discover the features and functions of the visual resources in Yu Lan;Third is to discover how the verbal resources are integrated with visual resources in Yu Lan to help readers get a further understanding of meaning and features of characters.In the study, 65 sentences and 20 images are selected from Yu Lan as resources to explore. The findings and results can be drawn as follows: Firstly, in the verbal aspect,material processes and verbal processes occur most frequently in 65 sentences, which indicates that the personalities of characters are mainly represented through what they do and what they say directly. Besides, declarative clauses and direct speech are used mostly in 65 sentences, which indicates that Pearl S. Buck tries to depict all the characters in an objective way. In addition, most of the sentences are ones with simple theme, which is in accordance with the characteristics of children’s stories while some sentences with multiple themes express logic of the story, which makes the language more coherent and easier to understand. Secondly, in the visual aspect, the narrativeprocesses take up a large proportion in Yu Lan with the aim to represent the characters in an objective and direct way. What’s more, offering images are more than the demanding ones in Yu Lan and the most of the images are taken from medium shot and horizontal perspective. In addition, the center and margin composition is adopted frequently in order to help children readers to realize the core information that the writer wants to deliver in the image. Thirdly, there is a complementary relationship between the verbal and visual modalities in Yu Lan, which contributes to representing the personalities of characters more complete.The significance of this study includes three aspects: First, the combination of Halliday’s SFG, Kress and Van Leeuwen’s VG and Royce’s inter-semiotic complementary theory is used as theoretical framework to make a research on children’s stories, which contributes to broadening the research field of MDA. Second,this study reveals the role that the integration of verbal discourses and images plays in expressing meaning in Yu Lan. Third, the contributions that the creation of Yu Lan by Pearl S. Buck makes to intercultural communication are further revealed in this study.Pearl S. Buck aims to deliver the cultural values of Chinese to American children in the story and tries to guide American children to make a cultural exchange in a fair and correct way. |
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