scholarly journals Multimodality’s challenge to marketing theory: A Discussion

2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul White

AbstractThis discussion challenges conventional marketing theory regarding posters and billboards in the twenty first century. It argues against the prevailing dogmatic statement that a poster or billboard must communicate its message in mere seconds (Drewniarny and Jewler 2011). It also points out that convergence of traditional media with new communication technologies is challenging the notion that posters and billboards are stillIn contrast, it proposes that assessing how people interact with billboards and posters from a mediated and multimodal discourse perspective is more useful. This involves looking at posters and billboards when they are actually in use rather than considering them only as they are present in the environment. The modal density foreground-background continuum (Norris 2004), the concept of a site of attention (Jones 2005) and the idea of the communicative space (White 2012) are multimodal discourse methodology tools that prove particularly illuminating in this context. While no empirical data is analysed as part of this discussion, mediated and multimodal discourse analysis of two specific examples from previous studies serves to illustrate the points made here.

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Marino

AbstractThis study aims to investigate the process of reconstruction of Māori postcolonial cultural identity in the twenty-first century which also passes through the reclamation and redefinition of ‘takatāpui’ notion. ‘Takatāpui’ is an umbrella term that nowadays indicates all the Māori with non-conforming wairua (spiritualities, gender identities), sexualities and sex characteristics. It is a culturally specific word which represents a form of intersectionality by identifying people as both Māori and queer.As a consequence of the increasing spread of the Internet, which has become a virtual place to construe identity and to promote the dissemination of ideas, a Multimodal Discourse Analysis is conducted on a corpus comprising 10 audiovisual texts fully retrieved from the web and exclusively produced by Māori takatāpui activists and/or containing Māori takatāpui activists’ self-narratives or claims.The corpus is analysed by applying a MMDA (Multimodal Discourse Analysis) framework based on Kress and van Leeuwen’s social semiotic framework (2006). The analysis is conducted also by taking into account Blommaert’s linguistic and ethnographic framework (2014).The findings of the analysis show the different strategies through which Māori identities are construed and conveyed reinforcing what the Māori scholar, Tuhiwai Smith (1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Dunedin: Zed Books Limited, 28), calls “a very powerful need to give testimony to and restore a spirit, to bring back into existence a world fragmenting and dying”.


Pragmatics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica S. Robles

The phenomenon of misunderstanding is a recurrent feature of everyday life – sometimes a source of frustration, sometimes a site of blame. But misunderstandings can also be seen as getting interactants out of (as well as into) trouble. For example, misunderstandings may be produced to deal with disaffiliative implications of ‘not being on the same page,’ and as such they may be deployed as a resource for avoiding trouble. This paper examines misunderstanding as a pragmatic accomplishment, focusing on the uses to which it is put in interactions as a practice for dealing with threats to intersubjectivity: the extent to which persons are aligned in terms of a current referent, activity, assessment, etc. A multimodal discourse analysis of audio and video recordings of naturally-occurring talk inspects moments in which misunderstandings are purported or displayed (rather than overtly invoked) as well as how such misunderstandings are oriented to as simply-repairable references, versus inferential matters more misaligned and potentially fraught. Rather than being a straightforward reflection of an experience of trouble with understanding, misunderstanding may also be collaboratively produced to manage practical challenges to intersubjectivity.


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 99-132
Author(s):  
Binjun Hu

Abstract This paper traces how Maneki-Neko becomes appropriated by a specific demographic of people (mostly business owners) in China as Zhaocaimao since the 1980s, and travels with the recent Chinese migrants to South Africa after Apartheid. It aims to demonstrate how the flows of people and cultural symbols were mutually constructed through the ongoing, intersected process of adaptation and appropriation in new territories. A multimodal discourse analysis was performed on texts and images collected from interviews with ten people in Johannesburg’s Chinatowns. The paper arises from the conceptual backdrop of Sanders’s (2015) theory on adaptation and appropriation and Appadurai’s (1990) work on disjunctures in the politics of global culture. It argues that the process of sustained engagement between Maneki-Neko and the Chinese people who have appropriated it is mutually constructed and undergoes constant geopolitically embedded transformations of sinification as Maneki-Neko travels to new circumstances and contexts. Notably, the transnational appropriation and adaption of cultural symbols from folk traditions in a diasporic context create a sense of empowerment and ownership. Zhaocaimao in South Africa has become a symbol of a micro-identity against the backdrop of the disjunctive global economy and culture of today which turns the locality into a discursive field of Chinese identity/Chineseness and a site of ritual economy.


Author(s):  
Dale Chapman

Hailed by corporate, philanthropic, and governmental organizations as a metaphor for democratic interaction and business dynamics, contemporary jazz culture has a story to tell about the relationship between political economy and social practice in the era of neoliberal capitalism. The Jazz Bubble approaches the emergence of the neoclassical jazz aesthetic since the 1980s as a powerful, if unexpected, point of departure for a wide-ranging investigation of important social trends during this period. The emergence of financialization as a key dimension of the global economy shapes a variety of aspects of contemporary jazz culture, and jazz culture comments upon this dimension in turn. During the stateside return of Dexter Gordon in the mid-1970s, the cultural turmoil of the New York fiscal crisis served as a crucial backdrop to understanding the resonance of Gordon’s appearances in the city. The financial markets directly inform the structural upheaval that major label jazz subsidiaries must navigate in the music industry of the early twenty-first century, and they inform the disruptive impact of urban redevelopment in communities that have relied upon jazz as a site of economic vibrancy. In examining these issues, The Jazz Bubble seeks to intensify conversations surrounding music, culture, and political economy.


Author(s):  
Hoang Van Nguyen

AbstractThe discourses of risk serve to organise the ways in which we understand and respond to potential harms and threats, which have become a major concern in our daily life. However, the discourses of risk have not been extensively investigated using linguistic text-based methods on the multimodal level, nor deeply examined beyond Western contexts. Grounded in the literature of risk and multimodal discourse, the aim of the study is to demonstrate Multimodal Discourse Analysis from a Systemic Functional Linguistics perspective as a potential methodology to investigate how risk discourses are constructed in and through semiotic resources in a non-Western setting. Through a case study of child helmet awareness advertisements in Vietnam, the multimodal analysis reveals a comprehensive picture of risk discourses constructed across various semiotic modes. In this analysis, the discourses of risk are constructed through a negotiation of expert knowledge and traditional values to encourage the audience to take actions and provide helmets for their children. Findings of the study demonstrate the use of Systemic Functional multimodal approach to media and communication to provide evidence for risk discourses in the Vietnamese setting, which are at odds with the current literature and can potentially be extended to other contexts.


SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 215824402110321
Author(s):  
Hesham Suleiman Alyousef

This qualitative study examined multimodal cohesive devices in English oral biology texts by eight high-achieving Saudi English-as-a-foreign-language students enrolled in a Bachelor of Science Dentistry program. A Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) of the textual and logical cohesive devices in oral biology texts was conducted, employing Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion analysis scheme. The findings showed that students used varied cohesive devices: lexical cohesion, followed by reference and conjunctions. Although ellipsis was minimally employed in the oral biology texts, its discipline-specific uses emerged: the use of bullet points and numbered lists that facilitate recall. The SF-MDA of cohesion in multimodal semiotic resources highlighted the processes underlying construction of conceptual and linguistic knowledge of cohesive devices in oral biology texts. The results indicate that oral biology discourse is interdisciplinary, including a number of subfields in biology. The SF-MDA of pictorial oral biology representations indicates that they include instances of cohesive devices that illustrate and complement verbal texts. The results indicate that undergraduate students need to be provided with a variety of multimodal high-cohesion texts so that they can successfully extend underlying conceptual and logical meaning-making relations.


2021 ◽  
pp. 136754942110032
Author(s):  
Beatriz Carbajal-Carrera

Heroic narratives are often biased towards a conceptualization of the rural/urban difference that positions rural identities at the margins. In particular, superhero stories have traditionally offered a vision of heroism assumed to be male, urban and young. How can post-rural contexts shaped by migration contest these narrative patterns? This article examines the street narrative of Fenómenas do rural, which recognizes older female rural identities and casts them as superheroines. Through a multimodal discourse analysis, I examine its contestation of heroic patterns, its recognition of older female rural identities and its creation of affiliation opportunities for the Galician community. I argue that this narrative stands as a reflection of the rurban (rural + urban) and the glocal (global + local) elements that subverts pre-existing canons in the superhero and the meiga (‘witch’) mythology imaginaries.


2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 150-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyn Parker ◽  
Chang-Yau Hoon

Abstract Scholarly predictions of the secularization of the world have proven premature. We see a heterogeneous world in which religion remains a significant and vital social and political force. This paper reflects critically upon secularization theory in order to see how scholars can productively respond to the, at least partly, religious condition of the world at the beginning of the twenty first century. We note that conventional multiculturalism theory and policy neglects religion, and argue the need for a reconceptualization of understanding of religion and secularity, particularly in a context of multicultural citizenship — such as in Australia and Indonesia. We consider the possibilities for religious pluralism in citizenship and for “religious citizenship”. Finally, we propose that religious citizenship education might be a site for fostering a tolerant and enquiring attitude towards religious diversity.


Author(s):  
Shuting Cao ◽  
Rui Chen ◽  
Haiyuan Liu ◽  
Ruolin Shi

The main goal of college English education is to cultivate the students’ language ability of listening, speaking, reading and writing, and to promote the formation of individualized learning and autonomous ability of college students. At present, the new curriculum reform in our country has put forward a new educational requirement to college English teaching, which requires the innovation of college English teaching idea, and under the background of the development of new media, it proposes to use new media equipment to carry out teaching activities. However, college English education in our country is influenced by examination-oriented education mode, and the traditional education method is still used, which is not good for college students to improve their comprehensive quality of English. In view of this development situation, the Ministry of Education of China Based on the development of new media, a multimodal discourse analysis approach to college English education is proposed to enhance the level of College English teaching.


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