Yiqiong Zhang

Guangdong University of Foreign Studies · Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics

Using a critical ‘hypermodal approach’ informed by social semiotics, this paper investigates the changing discourses of marketization found on the website of the National University of Singapore over a 14-year period. Analysis of visual-spatial features and action potentials of progressive versions of the site reveals changes in the website functio...

This paper shows how a multimodal discourse analysis of the changing visual designs of a science news website between 2009 and 2013 can reveal fundamental changes in visual forms of address, which must be acknowledged alongside shifts being observed at the level of linguistic address. Designers deploy design features in a shift from presenting scie...

This study explores how marketing and science rhetoric have become entrenched in online science news stories. The schematic structures of a corpus of 270 news stories from three types of website (university websites, the websites of Futurity.org and MSNBC.com) have been analyzed and compared. An eight-move structure identified from the corpus sugge...

This study investigates an adult writer's multimodal composing and traversals across linguistic, symbolic and visual modes in a research article and PowerPoint slides. Adopting a process-oriented approach, and drawing upon analytical perspectives from ‘academic literacy’ and the concept of ‘the transmodal moment’ informed by social semiotics, this...

This study examines the evolutionary trajectory of graphicons in a 13-year corpus of comments from BiliBili, a popular Chinese video-sharing platform. Findings show that emoticons (kaomoji) rose and fell in frequency, while emojis and stickers are both presently on the rise. Graphicon distributions differ in comments and replies to comments. There...

This manifesto stems from a transmedia initiative for collective research designed to shape-from the bottom-up-a socially responsive and responsible culture of inquiry, in observing, recording, sharing and reflecting on the changes to communication and interaction caused by the COVID-19 crisis and their enduring effects post-pandemic. The objective...

This manifesto stems from a transmedia initiative for collective research designed to shape-from the bottom-up-a socially responsive and responsible culture of inquiry, in observing, recording, sharing and reflecting on the changes to communication and interaction caused by the COVID-19 crisis and their enduring effects post-pandemic. The objective...

This study aims to uncover the complexity of emoji usage on Chinese social media. We investigate emoji usage in comments on push notifications from the WeChat official account of Guokr , which was chosen as a representative for an open forum for public communication. The data includes 2552 comments from 90 articles pushed by the account. The analys...

This article adopts a multi-analytical perspective to examine engagement in an evolving science communication website. The website has evolved to engage readers from a "verbal nucleus" inherited from traditional news to a "hypermodal nucleus" that caters to the information consumption style of social media, and further to a "scifopost" that integra...

This article is an improved version of A different smile, a different story: Global advertising adaptation for Chinese consumers, published as a research paper in 2012

This paper adopts a social semiotic perspective to investigate how hypermodal resources (e.g., text, image, hyperlinks) integrate on two university homepages to simultaneously create an official gateway and an institutional identity. In the first case, the homepage of National University of Singapore foregrounds and promotes its identity as a vibra...