A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Junior High School English Textbooks From The Perspective Of Intersemiotic Complementarity Theory

Multimodal discourse is produced in the cultural context of the electronic age,the information age and the multimedia age.It is a phenomenon that uses auditory sense,visual sense,tactile sense and other senses to communicate through language,images,sounds,actions and other means and semiotic resources.As an important support for English teaching in China,textbooks have shown strong multimodal characteristics with the development of information technology.At the same time,the analysis and evaluation of English textbooks at home and abroad have also shifted from monomodal perspective to multimodal perspective.The most common modes in English textbooks are verbal semiotic and visual semiotic.Therefore,it is very important for teachers and students to understand and master the multimodal features in the textbooks,and effectively identify the way of constructing modal meaning and the complementary relationship between modes.Therefore,this study is based on the intersemiotic complementarity theory to study the meaning construction and complementation of verbal semiotic and visual semiotic in PEP Grade Eight junior high school English textbooks.Following the steps of image meaning,text meaning,and image-text meaning to examine whether there is a multimodal complementary relationship between images and text at the semantic level.First of all,this thesis discusses how the visual semiotic in the textbooks construct the representational,interactive and compositional meaning.Secondly,this thesis explores how verbal semiotic in the textbooks achieve ideational,interpersonal,and textual meaning.Finally,the complementary relationship between the two modes in the textbooks is probed into further.The research found that the visual semiotic in PEP Grade Eight junior high school English textbooks realize representational meaning through the actional process.Under the interaction of the three variables of contact,distance and perspective,the equal and close social communication relationship is constructed to achieve the interactive meaning.Under the joint action of information value,salience,and framing,the compositional meaning with obvious information and high salience is achieved.As far as the verbal semiotic is concerned,the ideational meaning is constucted by showing the material process and the relational process.Through the interactive relationship between information provided by textbooks and information required by students,interpersonal meaning is achieved.The use of marked theme and unmarked theme can realize textual meaning.In addition,visual semiotic and verbal semiotic play a complementary role in presenting English conceptual knowledge,showing communication relationships and optimizing page composition.It is embodied in the use of semantic relations of repetition and synonymy to realize the ideational intersemiotic complementarity.Through expressing the attitudinal congruence and person concord,interpersonal intersemiotic complementarity is realized.Compositional intersemiotic complementarity is realized through separation,line separation and blending.