Multimodal Discourse Analysis Examples

John Swales and James Paul Gee discuss about the samic tipic “Discourse”. In my point of view, their understanding of “Discourse” is similar. However, they explain it in different ways. In John Swales’ essay, he gives six defining charactertics of discourse community.

Multimodal Rhetoric is the use of design elements, such as images and charts, to enhance the argument through visuals. My use of multimodal elements was to aid in the persuasion of the current problem. I did not rely on the design elements of the report to make my arguments. I was confident early on that I would use multimodal elements as an enhancer, rather than a crutch. I chose the use of comics because I feel they are an efficient use of pathos and logos.

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While creating my rhetorical analysis paper I used all of my typical writing processes. I began this assignment by selecting a commercial that I thought would be the most appealing in the superbowl. After selecting my commercial I did some research at the library using EBSCOhost. I then created an outline on what my paper would be about and pieced all of its parts together. In the future I will try to recieve help earlier on because at first I struggled to understand what the purpose of the paper was.

The main advantages of the experimental method is the ability to control what each participant experiences and this allows researchers to test precise and accurate hypotheses and draw conclusions about how one variable affects another. The main disadvantage of is that it cannot replicate or reproduce the complexity of real life and it can miss social rules and other factors that could establish whether a bystander intervenes or not. The discourse analysis, on the other hand can capture a richer and more varied picture of people’s experiences and looks at people’s actual experiences. However, it cannot provide general rules about human behaviour that could be applied to more than one

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Semiotics deals with signs but signs cannot be explained in terms of media, these signs can be anything from vocal, verbal, non-vocal, non-verbal to subliminal. Semiotics deals with two major sub categories which are signifier and signified. Signifier states that any word or a picture which is spoken or shown to the audience. Signified is the perceived meaning behind it. For example if you see the color red many people will perceive it as a clowns nose or a red stop sign.

2.1 Representation and identity A Cultural theorist, also a leading figure of the development of media and cultural studies, Stuart Hall’s cultural representation theory is very representative and has a significant impact in the field of cultural studies. His book “Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices” published in 1997 is a study of the crucial links between language, culture and how shared meanings are constructed and represented within the language. Hall believes culture plays the primary role in how we construct meaning and representation was closely related to culture. Representation is the process by which meaning is produced and exchanged between members of a culture through the use of language, such as

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These texts are analysed through multimodal discourse analysis to identify how verbal and visual signs relate within the text to create a meaningful message (Kress & Van Leeuwan, 2006). Kress and Van Leeuwan (2006) provide three interrelated systems which are used in the formation of multimodal text and the meaning within the text. These systems include informational value, salience and framing. Informational value is the placement of various signs in the multimodal text and how this placement contributes to the meaning of the text (Kress & Van Leeuwan, 2006).

There is such a variety of definitions regarding discourse that make it difficult to stick to one definition, therefore the context to which discourse is used is helpful to narrowing down a less diverse definition. Michel Foucault (philosopher, social theorist and literary critic) used various definitions of discourse at separate instances. The rough definition that Foucault suggests for Discourse is ‘the general domain of all statements’. He also defines discourse as an adapted cluster of statements, which could relate to the distinct structures in discourse. Discourse has to do with distinguishing groups of statements which are controlled in a way that they match and reach a mutual effect.

Conversation analysis ( abbreviated CA) has a crucial importance in daily life of people communication. Conversation analysis studies both formal and non-formal exchanges talks among people, it also studies verbal and non-verbal action. McCarthy et al. (2002: 60-61) state that conversation analysis “ is concerned with the detailed organization of everyday conversation”. As to Crystal (1997:75) defines conversation analysis as "a term used in linguistics and associated discipline to refer to a method of studying the sequential and coherence of conversations ( in their everyday sense) usually employing the techniques of ethnomethodology".