An Analysis on Multimodal Medical Discourse

Multimodality has become a common feature of human communication. This paper tries to discuss the relationship between language and image symbols in medical discourse by regarding multimodal discourse analysis as the theoretical framework, the purpose of which is to make an analysis of medical discourse by applying multimodal discourse analysis method so as to reveal how image symbols construct and strengthen the meanings of language symbols. At the same time, it also shows that the construction of discourse meanings not only rely on language symbols, but also they are dependent on other non-language symbols. In this way the feasibility as well as operability of analyzing medical discourse from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis can be verified. The first part of this paper gives a general introduction to the whole paper. The second part discusses theoretical basis of the study, namely a review of systemic functional linguistics. The third part makes analysis of medical discourse under the guidance of multimodal discourse analysis, including selection and collection of corpus, characteristics of medical discourse as well as interpretation of multimodal functions of medical discourse. At last, a brief conclusion of the whole paper is given.