The CEA Forum

Winter/Spring 2007: 36.1

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Book Review:

Royce, Terry D. and Wendy L. Bowcher, eds. New Directions in the Analysis of Multimodal Discourse. Mahwah, NJ : Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007.

by Christine Denecker, The University of Findlay

It may be a long leap from cave drawings and hieroglyphics to YouTube and the new iPhone, however, in each case the medium utilized suggests that meaning-making can and does occur in modes of communication other than alphabetic language. This impulse to study how various visual, verbal, aural, electronic, and written modes connect intersemiotically provides the theoretical framework for Royce and Bowcher's edited collection of research entitled New Directions in the Analysis of Multimodal Discourse, a text which affords readers a “social semiotic view of multimodal communication” (ix).

Structured particularly by Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), the text reconfigures the boundaries and theoretical issues of multimodal textual analysis by incorporating research from a number of areas including composition, computational concordancing, graphology, and second-language contexts. In addition, contributing authors represent universities and cultures as varied as their respective areas of scholarship. As a result, the international “flavor” of the book helps underscore the notion of the expansiveness of multimodal discourse and further troubles the issues of how students as well as research scholars read and interpret multimodal texts across cultural lines.

With an audience of “linguists, applied linguists, and communication theorists” in mind, New Directions opens with a piece by Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen that explores the multidimensionality of systemic functional theory. Calling language “inherently multimodal” (24), Matthiessen argues that texts should be “analyzed as complexes of rhetorical relations” (33). Matthiessen's article is well placed in the collection in that it sets the scholarly tone and premise of the text: the research here and to follow is thoroughly grounded statistically, analytically, and/or theoretically as appropriate to the subject at hand. Furthermore, all the articles in the collection uniformly hearken back to an over-arching discussion of how meaning-making is inherent among multimodal forms of communication. For example, Royce, who contributes two articles to the collection, focuses his first piece on what he calls the “intersemiotic complementarity” (103) of visual and verbal modes of communication. Through an analysis of a March 1993 article from The Economist, Royce demonstrates how the relationship between the visual and the verbal creates a synergy that results in a message with a total greater effect than would be possible if the individual visual or verbal messages was read independently.

Similar in focus to this specific contribution by Royce is Bowcher's analysis of an article from the Australian Sports magazine, Rugby League Week. In her study of the1997 piece entitled “Good Guys, Bad Guys”, Bowcher discusses the interrelationships between images and written language. Among other findings, her research reveals a complexity of multimodal messages that underscores Royce's theory of a synergistic element which emerges when visual and print texts are read against and with one another. Bowcher further notes that an “underlying ideology”, replete with social implications, also manifests itself upon the examination of such multimodal texts. This outcome, she argues “suggests possible ideological directions in the application of Royce's concept of intersemiotic complementarity” (239). Adding to the individual findings of Royce and Bowcher is yet another analysis of meaning-making among visual representations: Victor Lim Fei's “The Visual Semantics Stratum: Making Meanings in Sequential Images”. In this piece, Fei analyzes the “Baby Blues” comic strip series in an effort to develop a framework as well as some initial metalanguage to better understand and discuss the nature of meaning-making in a series of images.

A balance to these selections focusing on print and visual texts can be seen in the editors' inclusion of a series of articles that contemplate multimodal discourse in electronic mediums. For example, in “Mapping the Multimodal Genres of Traditional and Electronic Newspapers,” John Bateman, Judy Delin, and Renate Henschel deliver on the text's intent to expand theoretical boundaries by problematizing and stretching the meaning of “genre”. By analyzing genre against its traditional parameters in the newspaper field, the authors conclude that electronic newspapers are emerging as a genre all their own since they are at once multidimensional yet bound by a much different layout structure of web design and navigational elements than traditional print newspapers. Web-based projects (among others) also are of interest in Anthony Baldry's study into “The Role of Multimodal Concordancers in Multimodal Corpus Linguistics.” In his selection, Baldry describes the Multimodal Corpus Authoring system (MCA), produced in Italy , which enables researchers to analyze “cinema, DVD, TV or web-based films” (173). Along with recounting the development and progress of MCA (initially developed to study a corpus of car advertisements), Baldry's article delineates some of the system's most recent capabilities which include research sharing and access among various universities. Baldry also calls for increased study into the emerging field of multimodal corpus linguistics as existing concordancing tools continue to be refined and new tools created.

The latter portion of Royce and Bowcher's collection includes representations of research into the impact of multimodal discourse on second language learners and grammar school students. Bernard Mohan et al.'s article poses questions regarding common features and readings of scientific diagrams across cultures and takes a specific look at scientists' reading of multimodal texts in the participant's first versus second language. Likewise, the work of Alfredo Ferreira as well as a second article by Royce each suggests the empowering possibilities that may occur if “multimodal communicative competence” is developed among second language learners (389). Similarly, a push for multiliteracy among students and multiliteracy pedagogies employed by instructors stands at the forefront of Len Unsworth's analysis of children's literature classics such as Stellaluna, Shrek, and The Little Prince. With appropriate references to the New London Group, Unsworth and Royce, respectively, create compelling and relevant arguments for an increase in “more integrative intermodal semiotic theory” (357). Royce, in particular, stresses Gunther Kress's suggestion that it is not enough to just “read” one mode of communication; instead, full interpretation only occurs when all modes of meaning in a message are read together. This point seems a pertinent ending to a text devoted to a better understanding of how and why visual, verbal, aural, electronic, and print modes should be further analyzed and theorized for their meaning-making capabilities.

While those in the fields of linguistics and communication have the most to gain from the studies in Royce and Bowcher's collection, students as well as researchers in rhetoric, composition, English as a Second Language, and education will find particular selections in the text to be compelling and relevant to their own areas of scholarship. Indeed, this collection delivers on its promise to explore “new directions” and new methods for analyzing multimodal discourse.

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