Multimodal Discourse Analysis Essay Example

Monomodality is a form of communication which uses one mode, for example text. Nowadays, the use of monomodal texts have decreased, while the importance of multiple forms of communication has become more prominent due to the rise of technology and people had been printed materials as much as they used to (Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen, 2001:1).

The term ‘multimodality’ was mentioned for the first time in the mid-nineties (Jewitt, Bezemer, O’Halloran, 2017:7), and it was The Sidney School of semiotic where this term was used for very first time(Van Leeuwen, in  Tannen, Hamilton and Schiffrin , 2015:449). Patricia Bou- Franch and Pilar Gracés- Conejos Biltvich (2019:6) consider that multimodality entered linguistics through Kress and Van Leeuwen’s works such as Reading Images (1996) and Multimodal Discourse (2001). Rosie Flewitt (2011:293) agrees by stating that multimodality is rather a recent field of research that has evolved from social semiotics, yet it has been adapted by researchers from different disciplines. Which study various methods and theoretical approaches to explore how people communicate, learn and representation of people, signs and pictures to name a few.

Discourse analysts began by analysing spoken discourse, before moving on written discourse. Nowadays in the ever-growing world of Internet, discourse analysis has moved on to multimodal discourse analysis, which is known as discourse the deals with images and videos, which can be found on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram to name a few (Berger, 2016:6).

John Bateman, Janina Wildfeuer, Tuomo Hiippala (2017:17) define multimodality as a way to describe a situation which uses different forms of communication in order to convey a message to the consumers of media, mentioning television is one of the most notable examples would choose multimodal resources to convey news to the viewer by using spoken language, videos and pictures (ibid.). 

Generally, scholars agree that multimodality combines several semiotic modes (Fairclough, 2003; Danesi, 2009; Discreto, 2018; Norris, 2019) such as image, visual imagery logos, videos, sound, language to tell a story to the audience. Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen have investigated why multimodality is required by pointing out one of the main questions of the multimodality is ‘why this mod is applied in selected area by the author of the text and what is the purpose of it?’ (2001:45).

Sigrid Norris (2004:1) provides a deeper into multimodality of spoken discourse by stating that interactions in spoken discourse are multimodal which means there are multiple modes applied in communicative situation to convey a message to the audience. Norris (ibid.) Emphasises that went to or more people communicate with each other there’s not only the Choice of vocabulary or the organisation of speech that matter but also prosody on the pitch off voice that are essential in conveying the message.

Halliday (in Paltridge, 2012:170-171) suggests that there are three types of meaning, namely ideational meaning, interpersonal meaning and textual meaning. Ideational meaning focuses on the content of the text. For example, news article, they will focus what the author wants to convey with the news. As for the interpersonal meaning, it looks of the relationship between the participants of the discourse. Textual meaning deals with the organisation of the text.

Paltridge (ibid.:175) proposes genre and multimodality framework, which consists of six interrelated elements, namely content, genre, oracle, linguistic, navigation and layout structure. Content structure focuses on how information is communicated by the author of the material. Genre structure deals with the arrangement of the information in the text. As for the rhetorical structure, it deals with the logical structuring of the text into the main part and supporting parts. Linguistic structure focuses on the verbal elements within the layout of the material, end the navigation structure focuses on the mode of consumption or is it printed or digital material (ibid.).

Paltridge (ibid.:175) states that there are sections in online news which are dedicated to various topics, and the main page focuses on the overview of the news taking place on a particular day, which are known as newsbits- the purpose of newsbits is to stressed the importance of the segments and to draw the viewer’s attention to the news.