The analysis of multimodal coherence in children’s picture books: Where the wild things are

Abstract

With the development of human society and technology, multimodal communication is more preferred. Children’s picture books are multimodal texts which incorporate resources of more than one semiotic system, such as language, pictures, color, and even typographical features. Therefore, the notion of discourse coherence should be extended from the purely linguistic sense to a broader multimodal sense. This study attempts to explore how various modes interact with each other to develop an integral multimodal discourse in children’s picture book: Where the Wild Things Are. Using Systemic Functional Linguistics and Visual Grammar as the analytical frameworks, the findings of this study significantly show that the coherence of children’s picture books is constructed in different meaning-making process. This study not only provides coherence strategies for children’s picture books, but also offers an effective coherence framework to other multimodal discourse.