A Study on the Multimodal Stylistic Features of Picture Book Finding Winnie

Abstract

Picture books are a literary genre with multimodal features that plays an important role in children’s education, entertainment and life. Children’s picture books have attracted a lot of attention from the academic circles. At current, scholars mainly focus on the studies of education, culture, translation and literature of children’s picture books, and few of them have studied children’s picture books from the perspective of multimodal stylistics. Therefore, based on the theory of multimodal stylistics, this paper will analyze the multimodal stylistic features of a children’s picture book named Finding Winnie which won the 2016 Caldecott Gold Award. This paper uses a combination of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis to study the foreground features and stylistic effects of the language, the image, the layout, the color, the typograph and the inter-semiotic relationships in this picture book. It is found that material process, verbal process and relational processes are prominent features of the verbal mode, as well as foreground features. Images are mostly narrative. The verbal text is on the right and below the image, and the characters are in the middle of the image, which both constitute the foreground feature of the layout. Warm colors of yellow and brown and cool colors of green and blue constitute the foreground features of the color mode. The slope and bold typefaces are the foreground features of the typograph mode. The intensified complementary relationship constitutes a prominent feature of the inter-semiotic relationships.