Interpersonal Meanings In Graphical Abstracts

Academic journal abstracts possess the dual function of summarizing the whole paper and promoting academic papers to gain a wide readership.However,in an era of literature proliferation,the competition of publication and citation is becoming more and more fierce,and verbal abstracts(VAs)are far from enough to serve the authors well.Therefore,they turn to presenting their readers with a new format of s,that is,graphical abstracts(GAs),which consist of both language and image.As this newly emerging type of abstracts has attracted little attention from researchers,this thesis aims to address this new format of abstracts in chemistry journals in an interpersonal metafunctional lens,and to compare monomodal abstracts with multimodal abstracts.The author collected 60 research articles from two general-purpose chemistry journals with high impact factors,each article having both VAs and GAs.Based on the abstracts,the author built a VAs Corpus and a GAs Corpus and annotated the moves of all the abstracts by employing Swales'(1990)IMRD model.The annotation was carried out in two steps.In the first step,the author annotated all the moves,and in the second step,an MS candidate annotated ten randomly selected article abstracts independently and a high inter-coder reliability was achieved.Next,the author marked all the linguistic and visual realizations of the interpersonal meanings in both VAs and GAs according to the theory of interpersonal metafunction(Halliday&Matthiessen,2004,2014),linguistic evaluations(Martin&White,2005),and visual grammar(Kress&van Leeuwen,2006).From the result of move annotation,this thesis discovers that compared with VAs,the moves in GAs really erode to a great extent,and that less than half of GAs possess the Introduction move in the verbal part,and that none of the image parts have the Introduction move and only three of which have the Discussion move.More strikingly,in the verbal part of GAs,many moves merge into one clause complex,especially the Method and Result moves.For the realizations of the interpersonal meanings in both corpora,it is revealed that VAs and the verbal part of GAs are quite similar,even though the length of the verbal part is reduced.All the clauses are realized in the declarative mood,only a few modal verbs with low value are found,and the image act in all the images is offering.These results indicate that the function of conveying information is the generic boundary that none of the speech community members is allowed to tread upon.However,the members are granted with the freedom to promote their research.Evaluations in language are found to have much more occurrences than modal verbs do,but the distribution of evaluative items in each move is disproportionate,with the Discussion move being the densest.But the semantic region of evaluation is limited to judgement and appreciation of attitude and force of graduation.Therefore,the price paid by the move erosion in GAs is outweighed by its benefit.The modality and the interactive meaning conveyed in images can significantly help the authors draw their readers' attention.For one thing,most of the images show a high modality with their colourful presentations.For the other,the participants represented in the images show a close distance,a frontal angle to engage the readers and eye-level angle to indicate an equal power relation.This thesis concludes that the text-image relations in GAs are complementary,and that the image part extends the range of interpersonal meanings of the whole.Another conclusion is that by employing GAs,the limitations in VAs are solved by GAs and thus can attract readers at the first sight.It is implied from this research that domestic publishers can follow this international practice and writers can use graphical abstracts to increase the possibility of acceptance.On the other hand,journals of social sciences and humanities can try to apply such practice.