A Tentative Study on Image-Word Definition in Multimodal English Learner's Dictionary
Based on the theory of multimodality under social semiotics,this paper makes a tentative discussion on image-word definition in English learner's dictionary.With a sampling survey of image-word entries of Collins COBUILD ADVANCED DICTIONARY of English,the study comes to the following conclusions:(1) concrete nouns of popular science indicating visible things tend to be defined by image-word modal;(2) there is a connection between types of image and head words: narrative images are usually used to define event nouns while conceptual images help define thing-nouns;(3) six types of relationship,such as exemplification,specific and general,exist between word definition and image definition,and three modes,i.e.paragraph + image,word + image and paragraph + word+ image,are used in image-word definitions.