Volume 3, Issue 1 -

Despite the proliferation of regulations governing health and content claims on food packages, customers continue to be confused and sometimes deceived. One reason for this is that most regulations adopt a rather restricted, language-centric view of what a claim is, a view that focuses on how claims represent reality as opposed to what claims “do”, the kinds of actions and human relationships they make possible. This paper introduces a perspective on package claims that takes account of their performative and multimodal dimensions. The pragmatic force of a food package, it argues, always depends on multiple conditions such as the identities of manufacturers, retailers and customers, the conditions under which packages are encountered, and the way multiple semiotic modes such as language, graphics, colors, fonts, the shape of packages, and even the shape and texture of the food itself interact. The multimodal dimension of claims is not limited to the intratextual links among different modes and different materialities on the package, but also the intertextual links among the elements on the package and other modes and materialities in the environments in which customers make purchasing decisions. A multimodal view of package claims attempts to understand how claims are situated within specific material contexts, specific social actions, and specific social practices, and how they function to index social identities for manufacturers, retailers, customers, and even government officials who make and enforce regulations governing their use.

This article explores the cultural association of modality in relation to Japanese art. It identifies the modality configurations between a set of Superflat images by Takashi Murakami and a set of Edo era images by three seventeenth and eighteenth century painters. The analytical framework employed in this study is Kress and van Leeuwen’s concept of the modality of images, which was developed in their book Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2006 [1996]). A focus on modality allows for a bottom-up investigation of the key aesthetic elements that act as a visual foundation for the images. The research reveals aesthetic similarities between the two sets of images and shows potential for creating historical andcultural associations with an artist’s determined manipulation of certain modality features within images.

This paper presents a study of hyperbole in the framework of Multimodal Discourse Analysis, based on video recordings of conversational English. Hyperbole is a figure of speech used to express exaggerated statements which do not correspond to reality but which are nevertheless not perceived as lies. Hyperbole opens up a discourse frame and establishes a new focus on information in speech making that piece of information more salient than surrounding discourse. The emphasis thus created thanks to various semantic-syntactic processes is reflected in prosody and gesture with the use of focalization devices. At last, prosodic patterns and gestures do not only reinforce verbal emphasis, they may fully contribute to the emphasis in a complementary way, and even constitute hyperbolic communicative acts by themselves. In the conclusion, we propose that hyperbole is used by speakers to construct an individual, intersubjective identity element.

This paper lays out the steps involved in the process of analyzing the rhetorical structure of TV ads with the employment of the content analytic software Atlas.ti 7. By drawing on a corpus of 87 TV commercials from brands that make up the world’s most valuable brands according to WPP’s BrandZ 2012 report and a resulting pool of 561 ad filmic segments, it will be shown (i) how TV ads may be segmented, (ii) how individual segments may be coded with one or more verbo-visual rhetorical figures in the light of three distinctive levels of analysis (on an intra-segment level, between two succeeding segments, against the background of an ad film’s “global semantic structure”) and (iii) how statistical output pertaining to the rhetorical structure of TV ads may be produced. This technically oriented analysis, which is part of ongoing research in the field of multimodal advertising rhetoric (cf. Rossolatos 2013a, 2013b, 2013c), is intended to contribute to scholarly research about the benefits that stem from combining an interpretive approach to the analysis of ads’ rhetorical configuration that is edified on film semiotics, with a quantitative approach, enabled by the employment of the content analytic software Atlas.ti 7.

This article focuses on the multimodal analysis of the several forms of interdiscursive hybridity that appear in new corporate films uploaded by a variety of companies on their YouTube channels. The article focuses on the multimodal discourse analysis of three corporate films, Powered by the Impossible , Pimp My Pump and The Redwolf Project , uploaded by Grundfos , a major Danish company, on their YouTube corporate film channel. Each of the chosen films is a complex multimodal text mixing pre-existing genres and discourses. These films appropriate and combine conventional corporate film features with entertaining features belonging to other discursive and generic contexts. These new strategies reflect the company’s continuous attempts to minimize the distance between them and their existing and prospective categories of customers.