“Dragon and Bear”: A SF-MDA Approach to Intersemiotic Relations

Abstract

Compared with analysing the meaning of discourse from the perspective of language only, multimodal discourse analysis embarking on modes like images, words, colour, sound and other elements can help understand the underlying meaning expressed more thoroughly. Systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA) built upon systemic functional theory (SFT) is employed in this study. An illustrated article issued in The Economist is taken as an example to fully dredge the intersemiotic relations between the text and the image. By describing the text, interpreting and explaining the underlying sociocultural background of the countries involved, it functions to fully excavate the differences and problems faced by the two countries so that strategies can be defined to cope with the existent problems within. The study finds out that there is an intersemiotic complementarity between the verbal text and visual image. Hopefully, this paper can pave the way for the future research of intersemiotic relations between different modes.

Visual-Text Integration in Digital Public Service Announcement: A Strategy to Fight Fake News Spread

“…Meanwhile, other social semiotic resources such as images, color, music, gestures and embodied action are defined as non-linguistics. Since this study involved verbal and visual rhetoric modes, SF helps to investigate linguistics while Kress & van Leeuwen's visual grammar, generated from SFG, examines non linguistics (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006), (Jewitt, 2014), and (Gao, 2017). As stated, SF-MDA approach is adapted from Halliday's premise that the organization of semiotic resources manifests the social function that the resources play in social interaction.…”

“…Hermawan discussed the creation of messages of Elementary School English textbook for Indonesian using the collaboration of images and language (Hermawan, 2013). In order to carefully examine sociocultural differences and problems between China and Russia, Gao explained the intersemiotic relation between text and images (Gao, 2017).…”

“…Adopted Kress & van Leeuwen's Visual Grammar, also called theory of Reading Images, analysis of PSAs of PSHE concerned with images as visual rhetoric modes. They are parts of the communicative system of human beings, so language should not be limited to single mode (Gao, 2017). In fig.…”

“…Narrative process displays the represented participant" actions and the event illustrated with the development and change of the action, event, and the placement of the represented participants (Gao, 2017). In this discourse, two action processes and a reaction process are identified.…”

Ideational Meanings in Results and Discussion Section of English Students’ Final Project Reports Viewed from SF-MDA

“…The previous studies related to SF-MDA have been found in many papers. They focused on advertisement (Enli, 2014), language acquisition (Liu, 2022), magazine (Gao, 2017), and tweets (Wignell et al, 2021), to mention a few. In academic discourse, the frameworks have been intensively used to investigate cohesion found in international postgraduate business students' multimodal written texts (Alyousef & Alnasser, 2015), thematic progression in Saudi Postgraduate Business Students' multimodal texts (Alyousef & Alsharif, 2019), theme and information structure (Alyousef, 2020a), the Textual and the Logical Cohesive Devices in a Postgraduate Accounting Course (Alyousef, 2020b), and experiential meaning in Saudi Postgraduate Business Students' multimodal accounting texts (Alyousef & Alsharif, 2017).…”