Article published In:
Pragmatics and Society: Online-First ArticlesInteractional multimodal metadiscourse in public health posters during the COVID-19 pandemic
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.
Keywords: metadiscourse, COVID-19, multimodal discourse analysis, visual grammar, compositional metafunction
Article outline
- 1.Introduction: Interactional metadiscourse, multimodality, and public health communication
- 2.Methods, corpus and approach
- 3.Models of analysis
- 3.1Interactional metadiscourse
- 3.2Socio-semiotic resources (Visual elements)
- 4.Findings
- 4.1Linguistic interactional metadiscourse
- 4.1.1Stance
- A.Hedges
- B.Boosters
- C.Attitude markers
- D.Self-mentions
- 4.1.2Engagement markers
- A.Reader pronouns
- B.Questions
- C.Directives
- D.Shared knowledge
- E.Personal asides
- 4.1.1Stance
- 4.2Visual socio-semiotic resources
- 4.2.1Information value
- 4.2.2Framing
- 4.2.3Salience
- 4.2.4Graphic elements
- 4.1Linguistic interactional metadiscourse
- 5.Discussion
- 6.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
Published online: 8 March 2024
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.22092.als
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.22092.als
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