Volume 5, Issue 2 -

In this paper, I defend two skeptical claims regarding current research on visual arguments and I explain how these claims reflect upon past and future research. The first claim is that qualifying an argument as being visual amounts to a category mistake; the second claim is that past analyses of visual arguments fault on both end of the “production line” in that the input is not visual and the output is not an argument. Based on the developed critique, I discuss how the study of images in communicative events can be carried out without the concept of “visual argument” and I illustrate this with two new directions of interdisciplinary research.

As multimodal works, comics are characterized as much by their use of language as by the style of their images. Sound effects in particular are exemplary of comics’ language-use, and we explored this facet of comics by analyzing a corpus of books from genres in the United States (mainstream and independent) and Japan (shonen/boys’ and shojo/girls’). We found variation between genres and between cultures across several properties of the content and presentation of sound effects. Foremost, significant differences arose between the lexical categories of sound effects (ex. onomatopoetic: Pow! vs. descriptive: Punch! ) between genres within both culture’s works. Additionally, genres in Japanese manga vary in the scripts used to write sound effects in Japanese (hiragana vs. katakana). We argue that, in English, a similar function is communicated through the presence or absence of textual font stylization. Altogether, these aspects of variation mark sound effects as important carriers of multimodal information, and provide distinctions by which genres and cultures of comics can be distinguished.

Television cooking shows have grown in popularity within the last two decades. As a media text, they reflect the surrounding culture and social practices and elicit various emotional responses in people. As a multimodal text, television shows utilize multiple modes to create meaning. Based on the view of cooking shows as a multimodal texts, this paper draws on Kress and Van Leeuwen’s social semiotic approach and examines how multimodal elements (linguistic, visual, sound, spatial, gestural) convey the authority of the tv host. In doing so, five different tactics from Van Leeuwen’s legitimation theory – personal, expert, role model, tradition, and conformity – of authority are identified and revealed. This paper provides an analysis of cooking shows that has resulted in a better understanding of the ways in which authority is constructed multimodally, and subsequently contributes to developing applications of multimodal analytical approaches in linguistic, cultural, and communication studies.

Crime infotainment is a hybrid type of television program in which each episode is based on a real criminal case and presented to the audience under the form of a reconstructed narrative. Research has shown that although violent crime is ubiquitous in other types of media, leading to an over-representation of violent content, crime infotainment is the most fear-inducing type of media as compared with newspaper coverage and television crime drama. This leads people to believe their lives are at risk and they consequently support cultural conservative politics of anti-crime measures which are excessive considering the risk. It is therefore important to understand how crime infotainment content is built to induce fear. Adopting the framework of Ideological Discourse Analysis developed by van Dijk (1995a, Discourse analysis as ideology analysis. In: Language and Peace, C. Schäffner and A. Wenden (Eds.), 17–33. Aldershot: Dartmouth Publishing, 1995b, Ideological discourse analysis. New Courant, 4:135–161, 2006, Ideology and discourse analysis. Journal of Political Ideologies, 11(2):115–140), the study presented here proposes an analysis of three French infotainment stories, comparing the semantic fields in their speech with the semantic fields developed in related newspaper articles. The study also proposes an analysis of image content in infotainment which leads us to the conclusion that the blurring of the lines between what is presented as (discursive) fact or (imagistic) fiction may well have a consequent impact on the audience.