On November 4th, at the invitation, Mr. Liu Shisheng, the doctoral supervisor and the dean of the college of foreign languages from Tsinghua University has delivered a lecture titled “Multi-modality Stylistics” to the faculty.

Prof. Liu started with the traditional genres and stylistics’ conception, leading the audience to later Multi-modal Stylistics, whose object of study is the modal of symbols in communication activities. Take advertising as an example, it includes images, letters/characters, colors, layouts, fonts/calligraphy and etc.. Multi-modals tylistics aims at the patterns and rules of the interaction among various symbols. Prof. Liu also pointed out two possible trends of multi-modal’s development, which are functional multi-modal stylistics and cognitive multi-modal stylistics.

Prof. Liu applied Liu Yiqing’s Shi Shuo Xin Yu to analyze the connection between images and words. Shi Shuo Xin Yu is a novel describing the stories and talks of officials in Wei Jin Dynasty, composed of 255 short stories, 149 illustrations.Prof. Liu summarized 8 different relationships between the illustrations and the words. The first 4 kinds are the images independent from the words(illustrating, deriving, emphasizing, and supplementing); the second group hasthe images affiliated to the words (illustrating and deriving); the third grouphas the words and languages affiliated to the images (illustrating); and the last kind is the images affiliated to the clauses. To refer to each kind of relation, Prof. Liu clearly explained with examples to stimulate the thinking of the presented audience.

The lecture is apart of the 2015’s Jiangxi Socio-science Academic Week, themed as “Prosper the Socio-science, Serve the Green Development, Advance the All-Round Well-off Society”; it is hosted by the Federation of Provincial Social Sciences and organized by the Translation Association of Jiangxi Province and our university.

Author: Liu Liqiong from School of Foreign Languages

Contact: 83983798

Editor: ZhengJianping