Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of English-Chinese Learner's Dictionaries

As a result of the flouring increase in international interaction and cooperation, bilingual dictionaries have become a necessary part of our daily intellectual, and cultural activities, especially for pedagogical purpose.With the development of modern photographic and printing technologies, there are more and more bilingual dictionaries acquire pictorial illustrations to increase their readability and assist word understanding. Although dictionary research has a long history, its study only focuses on pictorial illustration in linguistic field is limited. Due to this limitation of the scope, the present study will adopt the multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) approach to study the multimodal nature of English-Chinese learner's dictionaries (ECLDs). particularly from the perspective of language proficiency and cognitive competence.MDA is a new approach to discourse analysis based on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). It is an expansion of SFL that investigates the semiosis involving language and visual images or more than theses two resources. The development of MDA serves as an evidence of the fact the application of SFL to other semiotic resource has also been possible and productive. Throughout the researches on MDA. a body of work has also been built up describing the way that visual modes project their meanings. However, there has been a little work that specifically targets the nature of the intersemiotic relationships between the visual and verbal modes that co-existing in a multimodal text. This thesis will concentrate on the interrelationship between words and pictorial illustrations in ECLDs.Under the guidance of an integrated theoretical framework,which is based on Royce's (2007) and Lim's (2007) theories, the thesis compares the pictorial illustrations in Oxford Elementary Learner's English-Chinese Dictionary (OELECD,2nd ed.), and Oxford Advanced Learner's English-Chinese Dictionary (OALECD.7th ed.).By making a detailed analysis of the design of pictorial illustrations from ideational level and compositional level,the thesis attempts to find out the characteristics of the beginner's and the advancer's ECLDs and summarize the common features in the two dictionaries,which indirectly reveal one aspect of the language learner's cognitive competence. Finally, the thesis offers some practical advices on the design of pictorial illustrations for the ECLD making, and concludes that the user's language proficiency and cognitive competence are two significant considerations in designing pictorial illustrations for a successful ECLD.