Abstract
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.
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©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- We Have Yet to See the “Visual Argument”
- Pow, Punch, Pika, and Chu: The Structure of Sound Effects in Genres of American Comics and Japanese Manga
- Multimodal Legitimation Strategies on TV Cooking Shows
- Between Fact and Fiction: Semantic fields and Image Content in Crime Infotainment programs
- Book Reviews
- Jewitt, Carey, Bezemer, Jeff and O’Halloran, Kay: Introducing Multimodality
- Archer, A. and Breuer, E. O.: Multimodality in Higher Education
- Bezemer, Jeff, and Kress, Gunther: Multimodality, Learning and Communication: A Social Semiotic Frame
- Norris, Sigrid, and Daniela Maier, Carmen: Interactions, Images and Text-A Reader in Multimodality
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- We Have Yet to See the “Visual Argument”
- Pow, Punch, Pika, and Chu: The Structure of Sound Effects in Genres of American Comics and Japanese Manga
- Multimodal Legitimation Strategies on TV Cooking Shows
- Between Fact and Fiction: Semantic fields and Image Content in Crime Infotainment programs
- Book Reviews
- Jewitt, Carey, Bezemer, Jeff and O’Halloran, Kay: Introducing Multimodality
- Archer, A. and Breuer, E. O.: Multimodality in Higher Education
- Bezemer, Jeff, and Kress, Gunther: Multimodality, Learning and Communication: A Social Semiotic Frame
- Norris, Sigrid, and Daniela Maier, Carmen: Interactions, Images and Text-A Reader in Multimodality