A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Interpersonal Meaning On The PEP Senior High School English Textbooks

With the rapid development of multimedia technology,textbook discourse also shows obvious multimodal characteristics.Multimodal discourse analysis of textbooks has received increasing attention from scholars.However,few studies have analyzed multimodal textbook discourse from the perspective of interpersonal meaning.Based on this,the author believes that a multimodal discourse analysis of the interpersonal meaning on the PEP senior high school English textbooks is of certain research value.Based on Martin & White’s Appraisal Theory,Kress & van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar,and Martinec & Salway’s Logico-semantic Relations,this thesis conducts a multimodal discourse analysis on the PEP senior high school English textbooks,aiming to explore the interpersonal meaning constructed by both text and image resources,as well as how the texts and images establish interpersonal meaning jointly.After the analysis,this study draws the following conclusions:(1)The texts in the multimodal textbook discourse take advantage of rich appraisal resources to construct interpersonal meaning through attitude,engagement and graduation,reflecting the writer’s emotions,attitudes,and opinions.In the attitude system,appreciation resources take up the most to evaluate the events or phenomena.In terms of the engagement system,the writer uses contraction resources to ensure the authority of the textual voice.In the meanwhile,the use of expansion resources helps introduce other external voices and enhance the dialogical space with readers.As for the graduation system,the textbooks mainly employ force resources to increase the intensity and quantity of attitude,while rarely use focus resources.(2)The images in the multimodal textbook discourse construct interpersonal meaning through contact,social distance and perspective.As for contact,images of “offer” are mainly adopted to convey meaning more intuitively and objectively.In terms of social distance,the medium shot takes up the most,which can keep proper social distance between the writer and the reader.With respect to perspective,the images are mainly photographed from the frontal angle and eye level,which is more conducive to establishing an intimate and equal relationship with readers.(3)The images and texts of the multimodal textbook discourse are interconnected to build interpersonal meaning,in which extension relations occupy the most significant proportion.And the extension relations mostly refer to text extending image.It can be explained that in the textbooks,the verbal text is the most important to the spread of knowledge,while visual images only serve as an auxiliary to help students better understand the discourse.The text extends the image with a multitude of additional and associated information,considerably expanding the image’s content and interpersonal meaning.The findings contribute to understanding the ways of realizing the interpersonal meaning of images and texts in textbooks and enriching the research perspective of multimodal discourse.It is of great research value and significance for teachers and students to deeply comprehend the multimodal resources and the process of meaning construction in textbooks.