Interactional multimodal metadiscourse in public health posters during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

While language remains a constant channel of communication, visual information also plays a significant role in contemporary communication. This study explores the application of interactional metadiscourse and meaning-making in public health posters issued during the COVID-19 crisis. It examines both the textual and visual communicative strategies adopted in the multimodal texts of 60 COVID-19 posters published on the official websites of the World Health Organization and the Ministry of Health in Saudi Arabia. Principally, the study is framed within the theories of interactional metadiscourse by Hyland (2005b) and multimodality by Kress and van Leeuwen (1996/ 2006/ 2010), as investigated through their work on visual grammar. The frequency and functions of interactional metadiscourse resources and socio-semiotic resources were scrutinized and analyzed. The findings reveal that reader pronouns and directives were the most frequently used interactional metadiscourse to explicitly engage the target audience and guide them toward physical acts that maintain the application of health-protective procedures. The results further demonstrate that framing, salience, and images were the socio-semiotic resources most commonly utilized to achieve compositional meaning, explain content visually, and make information more readily comprehensible to the public.