Extending local grammar to multimodal meaning-making: a case study of conflict resolution in picture books
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Ding Huang
Ding Huang is a post-doctoral researcher at the National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education, Beijing Foreign Studies University, China. She obtained her Ph.D. from Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, with a dissertation titled
Formulaic Sequences in Early Modern English: A Corpus-assisted Historical Pragmatic Study . Her research interests include multimodal discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, construction grammar, formulaic sequences, and pragmatics of Early Modern English.
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Jiajin Xu
Jiajin Xu is professor of linguistics at the National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education, Beijing Foreign Studies University as well as secretary general of Corpus Linguistics Society of China. His research interests span corpus linguistics, discourse studies, second language acquisition, contrastive linguistics and translation studies. He has published papers in international journals including
Corpora ,Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory ,Corpus Pragmatics ,Discourse & Society ,English for Specific Purposes ,International Journal of Corpus Linguistics ,Journal of Historical Pragmatics ,Lingua, Language Sciences andSemiotica .
Abstract
This case study attempts to describe the mechanism of meaning-making in picture books as the unity of texts and images. The study proposes that the applicability of meaning/function-based local grammar extends to multimodal discourse. By examining six picture books considered prototypical conflict narratives, our study identified and analyzed multimodal local grammar patterns accounting for three meanings: evaluation, ownership, and identification. The findings revealed that some meaning units in verbal and visual modes possess stronger semantic and pragmatic relationships among themselves than with others. These multimodal meaning units further co-select to form larger meaning units. The study also demonstrated how these patterns reflect conflict resolution strategies. Three strategies were observed: updating specific functional elements of a multimodal local grammar pattern, replacing the entire pattern, and forming non-conventional verbal-visual co-selection relationships within a pattern. These findings may contribute to communication analysis and foreign language education.
Funding source: The China MOE Major Project Fund of Key Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences
Award Identifier / Grant number: 22JJD740012
About the authors
Ding Huang is a post-doctoral researcher at the National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education, Beijing Foreign Studies University, China. She obtained her Ph.D. from Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, with a dissertation titled Formulaic Sequences in Early Modern English: A Corpus-assisted Historical Pragmatic Study. Her research interests include multimodal discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, construction grammar, formulaic sequences, and pragmatics of Early Modern English.
Jiajin Xu is professor of linguistics at the National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education, Beijing Foreign Studies University as well as secretary general of Corpus Linguistics Society of China. His research interests span corpus linguistics, discourse studies, second language acquisition, contrastive linguistics and translation studies. He has published papers in international journals including Corpora, Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, Corpus Pragmatics, Discourse & Society, English for Specific Purposes, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, Journal of Historical Pragmatics, Lingua, Language Sciences and Semiotica.
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Conflict of interest: None.
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Research funding: The work was supported by the China MOE Major Project Fund of Key Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences. Grant number: 22JJD740012.
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