A Study Of Chinese Children’s Multimodal Disagreement From The Perspective Of Systemic Functional Grammar

Multimodal communication is inseparable from people’s daily lives.However,in the shadow of linguistics,multimodal communication hasn’t been thoroughly studied by scholars until the significant impact that technology made on daily life turned up.The author conducts a follow-up study on a mandarin-speaking child in order to find out the characteristics of multimodal disagreement of the child in case in different age periods.Driven by naturally happened multimodal communication,this study constructs an analytical model based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar and employs this model into the analysis of multimodal interaction.This analytical model scrutinizes children’ acts of disagreement from two strata: the content stratum and the expression stratum.By applying this theoretical framework,this thesis summarizes the multimodal representational characteristics of mandarin children’s disagreement in the age of 1.5-2.0,2.0-2.5,2.5-3.0 and 3.0-3.5.Firstly,for the content stratum,three metafunctions of multimodal disagreement of children are presented,which are interpersonal metafunction,ideational metafunction and textual metafunction respectively.From the perspective of interpersonal metafunction,there are different contexts in which disagreement occurs,including statements,questions and nonverbal stances.The corpus represents that acts of disagreement responding to statements and questions occur more frequently than that responding to nonverbal stances do.What’s more,most cases of disagreement triggered by statements and questions represent low modality while most cases of disagreement triggered by nonverbal stances represent high modality.From the perspective of ideational metafunction,children’s acts of disagreement present three processes of transitivity: material process,behavioral process and verbal process.As the child in case is growing up,the percentage of material processes is declining while the percentage of verbal processes is increasing.In the same time period,the percentage of behavioral processes is relatively constant.Secondly,for the expression stratum,three kinds of expressions are employed in children’s multimodal disagreement,which are verbal disagreement,nonverbal disagreement and verbal-nonverbal disagreement respectively.As the child in case is growing up,the percentage of nonverbal disagreement is declining while the percentage of verbal disagreement is increasing.On the other hand,the relationships between different modals of the corpus present two types: the equivalent relationship and the complementary relationship.The corpus reflects that the complementary relationship is the dominant type in children’s multimodal disagreement,which can be further divided into reinforced complementary relationship and non-reinforced complementary relationship.The implication of this study is that: a good grasp of multimodal communication is of significance for children’s mature linguistic competence.Therefore,for children who are in the period of language acquisition,their parents are encouraged to apply multiple resources in interactions.