A Multimodal Study On Image-text Relations In Advanced English Learner’s Electronic Dictionaries

Nowadays our life has been impacted by multimodal signs in every aspect.In terms of dictionary,an increasing number of electronic dictionaries are furnished with diverse definition modes as well.As the most intuitive mode in word defining,pictorial illustration is becoming an indispensable part of word definition.Although a great number of works propose that images construct meanings,few of them have specifically demonstrated the relationships between images and texts.This thesis selects two AELEDs(Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English5 th Plus IOS edition and Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 9th IOS edition)as the objects of research.Based on two theoretical foundations: Kress and Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar as positional approach and Martinec and Salway’s Image-text Relation System as semantic approach,this thesis aims at making a multimodal discourse analysis on the two AELEDs and draw a image-text pattern for the future designing of electronic dictionaries.To accomplish it,three main research questions should be figured out.1.What is current distribution of words with pictorial illustrations in AELEDs and what are the types of words need to be equipped with pictorial illustrations in AELEDs,is there any gap between them?2.What image-text relations are there in current AELEDs,is there any image-text relation problem in pictorial illustration designing in AELEDs?3.Based on the results of the former two research questions,what image-text relation pattern in AELEDs can be drawn?Experimental study,contrastive study and inductive analysis methodologies are adopted in this thesis.Finally,two tentative image-text relation patterns corresponding to LDOCEP and OALD9 are established.One tends to define entries directly in pictorial illustrations,showing the shape,color,visual appearance of objects or moves,and the other tends to define words in an indirect way,the features of objects are usually designed under certain circumstances or environments,and more attention is paid to the background information in pictorial illustrations.Though the two patterns differs in positional level and semantic level,they all represent an multimodal approach in word defining.And these two patterns can be referred to as guidance in multimodal electronic dictionary designing and help to make better electronic dictionaries.