This study explores how diverse high school English students designed open-ended, multimodal projects across digital platforms (Weebly, blogs, and Instagram). Framed by metafunctions, emergent and ...axial coding of each student’s website homepage shows a broad range of how they designed in digital spaces and to what rhetorical effects. Additional coding of two focal students’ designs across each of the digital platforms highlights how students created complex, multimodal compositions that would have otherwise not been possible with the typical more formal, rigid forms of discourse. By designing multimodally, students showcased interests, humor, emotions, and culture not often seen in this classroom.
This contribution discusses pragmatic linguistic aspects that indicate professional credibility in three popular digital knowledge dissemination platforms. Credibility here does not refer to the ...correspondence of platform content to ‘reality’, but to the pragmatic metalanguage interaction of researchers and platforms. Whereas Wikipedia is only a platform for distributing (multi-modal) information, Academia.edu and ResearchGate include a messaging system. Given their millions of users, all three systems include automated replies by (programmed) agents (bots), which can be classified as share, profit, and vanity agents – and only the first is usually perceived as a credible communication partner by a (linguistic) researcher. An analysis of pragmatic metalanguage (incl. interactive pronouns and reader address) makes this clear. Whereas Wikipedia only addresses its readers collectively in Wikipedia community style, Academia.edu and ResearchGate address their users individually; thus the first mentioned uses few personal pronouns, the latter many of them. For Academia.edu and ResearchGate, the internal platform structures and agents' email messages can be compared. A pragmatic corpus-linguistic evaluation of their (automated) language shows partly contrasting functions: some linguistic cues (e.g. modal auxiliaries) enhance the “sharing” community, others profit and vanity. For successful academic interaction, persuasive polite cooperation language contributes to the impression of credibility and professionalism.
•Discusses whether the three platforms serve the needs of (linguistic) researchers.•Describes their language interaction in internal posts and email messages.•Evaluates routine agents' language in their digital interaction with researchers.•Provides a quantitative lexical and functional comparison of email messages.
Over the past decades, populist propaganda has grown exponentially, triggering the proliferation of nationalistic discourses worldwide. Australia has not been exempt from the populist surge, which ...has propagated online and offline, yet without receiving enough academic attention. Considering the disintermediated interaction promoted by their communicative formats, Social Networking Sites (SNSs) are believed to have fostered the spread of populist ideologies. While recent research conceptualizes SNSs as socio-discursive sites where ambient affiliations come to be dialogically construed by means of conversational tagging, it has not been investigated whether and how hashtagging enables political dialogue among populist affiliates in virtual contexts. Aiming to fill this gap, the present research relies on a corpus-based mixed methodology that combines the semantic mapping of hashtags, through the quantitative methodologies of Social Network Analysis, with the qualitative approaches of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The article investigates a corpus of tweets posted by selected populist politicians active in Australia. Drawing upon Halliday's metafunctions of language, tweets were closely analyzed to gain insights into the semantic nature and linguistic functions of the collected hashtags. By borrowing Bakhtin's and Austin's terminological framework, the paper ultimately discusses how the Twitter ambient is dialogically built.
•Digital populism may proliferate on Twitter through the hashtagging practice.•Hashtags reveal the semantic fulcrums of the populist dialogues enacted onto the social media platform.•Mentions show how the populists' interlocutors are involved into the dialogic field of Twitter.•Twitter ambients can simultaneously be hetero- and mono- glossic.•Social Network Analysis offers an innovative way of investigating digital spaces from a linguistic perspective.
Los medios de prensa, que son lugares simbólicos de emisión (Raiter, 2001), escogen los recursos de lenguaje que determinan el “potencial de significado” (Gil & García, 2010) de los mensajes que ...comparten con sus públicos. Al hacerlo, presentan versiones de la “realidad” acordes con sus intenciones y sus particulares formas de ver el mundo. Este artículo presenta los resultados de un análisis de discurso en el que se evidencian los recursos lingüísticos que empleó la revista Semana para ocultar y representar al narcotraficante Pablo Escobar en ciertos procesos asociados a la guerra del narcotráfico en Colombia (1883-1993). El análisis se centró en las metafunciones ideacional e interpersonal de las cláusulas de 39 titulares de reportajes publicados por la revista en el periodo aludido.
Around the world, museums dedicate enormous resources to developing exhibitions with the aim of making their collections and knowledge accessible to broad public audiences. Interpretive texts, both ...spoken and written, play an important role in this endeavour, underpinned by the belief that they will add ‘something more’ to the experience gained by looking alone. But is this belief justified? This article draws on recent theoretical developments in systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and multimodal semiotics to explore the complexity of meanings and relations involved in the interaction between (verbal) text, displayed artefact and visitor in an art exhibition and a history exhibition. Focusing on two key dimensions, vergence and presence, it shows how the texts work in very different ways to shape visitor experience, both in terms of scaffolding the interaction and in adding meaning to the encounter. It proposes the idea of ‘verbal vectors’ that are gradable in strength as a feature that explicitly ‘motivates’ visitors to look at the displayed artefacts and the idea of ‘shell’ vectors as a particular feature of texts in art exhibitions.
This article presents a social semiotic framework for the multimodal analysis of website interactivity. Distinguishing it from interaction, it defines interactivity as the affordance of a text of ...being acted (up)on, thus including hypertextuality. The author introduces the notion of ‘interactive sites/signs’ as the loci of interactivity in digital texts; these have a two-fold nature and a two-dimensional functioning. In their two-fold nature, they are both places enabling actions producing effects and forms endowed with meanings. Notwithstanding the non-direct correspondence between forms, actions and effects (which makes any specific association between the three significant within a webpage design), and in spite of their many possible forms (encompassing still and dynamic images, shapes and writing), a small range of actions can activate them (click/click+type/hover), producing a restricted set of textual effects (access/provide/transfer text). In their two-dimensional functioning, interactive sites/signs function both syntagmatically, on the page where they are displayed, in their relation with other co-occurring elements, and paradigmatically, opening to optional text realizations, hence in their relation with these. The framework adapts Halliday’s three metafunctions to the analysis of the two-fold nature and two-dimensional functioning of interactive sites/signs. It provides a fine-grained account of the interactive meaning potentials of digital texts, distinguishing between a text’s aesthetics of interactivity – as visually communicated before it is activated, performed and experienced – and its functionality, in the configuration of interactive possibilities offered by a page. Designed to complement the extant practices of text analysis of webpages, the framework can be used comparatively, as exemplified in its application to the analysis of two blog pages, and can provide a more refined assessment of the interactive meaning potential of a webpage than traditional methodologies such as content analysis.
This research aimed to interpret the meaning of aspects in the verbal and visual texts to identify whether these two texts created interplay. It was intended to understand the meaning conveyed by the ...writer and illustrator in a Japanese children’s book entitled ‘Kuroino’ (Little Shadow). This research used the approaches for verbal text analysis by Halliday about Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and visual text analysis by Kress and van Leeuwen about Visual Grammar (VG). The research method was descriptive qualitative by explaining two data types: clauses in the Japanese language and images in the storybook. The data analysis of every aspect in the three metafunctions of language and the three metafunctions of images show the meaning that completes each other. In the analysis of ideational meaning, interpersonal meaning, and textual meaning, the writer narrates the friendship and adventure of ‘Kuroino’ (the Black) and Watashi (I). Meanwhile, in the analysis of representational meaning, interactive meaning, and compositional meaning, the illustrator describes two characters in a book entitled ‘Kuroino’ as the focuses in some pictures. Besides, the illustrator describes the background in detail as if he invites the reader to participate in the adventure of these two characters. Although verbal and visual texts describe a story from two different perspectives, in ‘Kuroino’, these texts collaborate to create a message in the story with synergy and meaning to be easily understood by the readers by maintaining the entertainment aspect in a story narrated.
I compare M.A.K. Halliday's metafunctional system with Jay Lemke's for the purposes of doing Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The differences I foreground turn specifically on notions of context ...and the distinction that Kenneth Burke makes between scientistic and dramatistic approaches to the analysis of meaning. I use a corpus of political and journalistic texts on 'austerity' discourses, and two examples from creative arts research projects, to demonstrate differences in the contextual potentials of the two systems that have implications for critical analysis. The analysis highlights differences in what Burke describes as analytic range and circumference, and differences in directionality between the two systems. Halliday's metafunctions provide a gateway into deeper and more detailed analysis of language, directing analysis into aspects of the text below the level of the clause. Lemke's is an action focused, two-way semiotic interface between cultural groups and the meanings they make, whether by means of language alone or by multimodal means, and demands that analysis begin with culture.
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