Supervisors: Kay O’Halloran, Lyndon Way
Contacts: Xinchao.zhai@liverpool.ac.uk
My PhD thesis is social semiotic interpretation of metaphors in children’s picture books. I look into metaphorical discourse and attempt to explicate the meaning-making mechanisms of such discourse. What makes these discourse special is that via metaphor an extra interpretive space is created; thus these texts open to multiple readings.
Research areas
Systemic functional linguistics, multimodality, social semiotics, metaphor study, and Critical Discourse Analysis
Academic acheivements
Zhai X, O’Halloran KL, Way L, Tan S. 2021. Gender Stereotypes in Children’s Picture Books: Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis. In Moya-Guijarro, J., Ventola, E. (eds.). A Multimodal Approach to Challenging Gender Stereotypes in Children’s Picture Books. London: Routledge.