Multimodal Discourse Analysis

Abstract

This article provides a brief overview of theoretical and methodological developments in multimodal discourse analysis. Multimodal discourse analysis refers to a field of academic research interested in investigating the ways in which meaning‐making practices and social interactions occur through multiple communicative modes. Stemming from various theoretical perspectives in applied linguistics, multimodal discourse analysis or multimodality explicitly highlights an analytical orientation whereby language is conceptualized as only one of the many communicative modes through which meaning‐making and social interaction are accomplished. Multimodal approaches have been employed to understand better a broad range of communicative phenomena, from language and literacy, to film, comics, corporate communication, and identity production. It is a rapidly growing domain of research and this can be attributed to the fact that all communicative phenomena are multimodal.

Show and (sometimes) Tell: Identity Construction and the Affordances of Video-Conferencing

“…Progressing from co-production and the distribution of attention/awareness, the data suggests that the reason show (and sometimes) tell manifests with such regularity and is recognised as such by the social actors involved in the multiparty interaction is due to the ways in which 'showing' functions as an exemplification of concrete experiences which are embedded in the material state of the object, entity or artefact. While analytical attention has been allocated to the identity producing potential of static objects placed in particular environments and the frozen actions embedded therein (Norris and Makboon 2015), here the relationship between the objects, their interactive relevance and the frozen actions embedded in them is explicitly acknowledged by social actors within the interaction.…”