An Analysis Of Ideational Meaning And Synergic Relationship Of Image-text In Multimodal Discourse

With the progress and development of multimedia technology,communication channels and modes have changed to a large degree.The discourse constructed by verbal sign alone cannot satisfy the expression of meaning,which should integrate with other semiotic resources to create meaning.Multimodal discourse analysis has become the focus of research in recent years.As an important medium in teaching,the multimodality of textbook discourse has also attracted great attention from linguists.This thesis conducts a case study of junior English textbooks Go for it published by People’s Education Press between 2012 and 2013 to explicate ideational meaning from the multimodal perspective.Drawing on Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics and Kress & van Leeuwen’s visual grammar,this study focuses on how verbal texts and visual images construct ideational meaning.Furthermore,how these two modes connect with each other is further discussed under the framework of Royce’s intersemiotic complementarity.The major findings of present study are as follows:(1)Narrative representation accounts for a large proportion of the visual images in English textbooks Go for it which is used to describe how actions or events happen via vectors whether real or virtual actors.Action process is the main narrative form in the construction of ideational meaning,where concrete actions emanated by represented participants are beneficial to help readers engage in context and learn actions by imitation.In the meantime,classificational process is regarded as the dominant form in conceptual representation where the readers’ logical reasoning ability can be promoted through represented participants in visual images that are used to convey a kind of relationship between superordinate and subordinate.(2)Material processes are mainly deployed in verbal texts to narrate an array of events to express ideational meaning in the analysis of transitivity system,with which relational processes are used to construe the relationship between entities as well as mental processes are often involved to express the experience of inner world.Moreover,middle voice and active voice take up the vast majority in voice types.(3)Visual images and verbal texts realize semantic intersemiotic complementarity in the course of constructing ideational meaning where repetition and collocation are the main types of semantic relations.It is indicated that the visual images and verbal texts complement with each other to realize ideational meaning better than single ones.The thesis shows that multimodal discourse of textbooks is helpful in the English teaching and learning and provides some implications for teachers and students who are able to better understand and employ textbooks.For teachers,they should lay emphasis on the complementary relations between visual images and verbal texts as well as take full advantage of multiple semiotic resources to convey ideational meaning so that students’ multiliteracy can be improved better.For students,they are supposed to enhance the sensitivity and identification of multimodal resources consciously.