American Research Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

As a typical form of multi-modal discourse, children’s picture books are an important resource for children’s early language and cultural education. It generally adopts multi-dimensional narrative form and combines images and texts to achieve the purpose of disseminating knowledge of learning language. This paper is mainly based on Kress and van Leeuwen’s social semiotic analysis and Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics, and attempts to employ a multi-modal analysis of a picture book in order to research how the image and text components create meaning of “death”. The study found that image mode and text mode in picture books complete with each other to express meanings, and in order to adapt to the cognitive level of children, the image mode have larger sizes, which are in line with children’s cognitive level