A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Ideational Meaning In Children’s Picture Books

Drawing on Halliday’s(1994)systemic functional grammar and Painter,Martin and Unsworth’s(2013)framework for analyzing ideational meaning of visual narratives,this thesis conducts a case study of a classic picture book The Tale of Peter Rabbit to explore the ideational meaning from the multimodal perspective.Three major questions are addressed in this study:(1)How are the characters,processes,and circumstances in the picture book The Tale of Peter Rabbit represented in verbal texts?(2)How are the characters,processes,and circumstances in The Tale of Peter Rabbit represented in visual texts?(3)How do the verbal texts and visual images interplay to construe the story in The Tale of Peter Rabbit?The transitivity system of language and visual social semiotic approach are applied in this analysis.139 English clauses and 26 images included in The Tale of Peter Rabbit are separately analyzed in detail to construe the ideational meaning.The results show that material processes are mainly deployed in verbal narrative to narrate a sequence of events to realize ideational meanings in each stage of the story.The visual study of the narrative has demonstrated that the repetition of the characters’ appearance reinforces the reader’s identification with the main character in the story.Besides,the protagonist Peter was presented in complete manifestation more frequently,while the antagonist Mr.McGregor was presented in metonymic manifestation more frequently.Through the two different ways of manifestation,the author’s stance or different attitudes toward characters could be subtly conveyed.As for the relations between actions,narrative events unfold with simultaneity in the stage of orientation and resolution,introducing the characters and contexts of the story or telling what happened finally,and in the stage of complication,narrative events unfold with temporal succession.In terms of circumstances,the story has been staged mainly through the change of location rather than that of time.The present study verifies the applicability and practicality of visual narrative frameworks to interpret children’s picture books.More importantly,this study relates the micro-level multimodal phenomena to the macro-level social contexts and makes an interpretation of the thematic significance of the story,which provides a guidance for teachers and parents to help children understand story in picture books,extending the application range of related theories in visual narrative research.