“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.