It has been a while since I last wrote on blogspot. I have enjoyed blogging for many years and I never lost hope of writing again.
Let me tell you what this blog is about and what
it aims to achieve.
I graduated from the Department of English Language at Cairo University and I am now at Lancaster to undertake my PhD in the Department of Linguistics at Lancaster University, in England, a great place to be if you are interested in linguistics and literature.
Well, my PhD journey is coming to its destination soon (with an awarded PhD! I hope). But for a couple of weeks or even months, the idea of this blog has been haunting me. I would like to create a blog about linguistics, not aimed at linguists, who are very wonderful people by the way ;) but to readers who may not have read about sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis and translation studies; some of the interesting disciplines I have enjoyed so far (trust me!).
So, through this blog, I will share with you some of the interesting things (events, books, topics) I experienced and my reflections on them.
So what this blog post is about?
In this first post, I will talk about “multi-modality” and will celebrate with you my new publication, on the topic!
Multi-modality is an approach “that understands communication and representation to be more than about language”. This means that in analysing interactions and communication, we take into account other elements in addition to verbal language such as image, colour and sound.
Last year, I participated in a conference on multi-modality in Bremen, in Germany.
And a book- that has developed out of the conference- is recently published, edited by Dr Janina Wildfeuer at Bremen University who herself has many publications on multi-modal analysis including a monograph on film discourse interpretation.
The name of the book that is recently published is Building Bridges for Multi-modal Research published by Peter Lang. As the name may suggest, the book provides an understanding of the different perspectives on multi-modality and how to combine the different approaches to multi-modal analysis.
The title of the chapter I wrote in the book is "Multi-modality in Perspective: Towards a Synergy of the Discourse Historical Approach and the framework of Visual Grammar".
I would like to explain what these terms refer to.
The Discourse Historical Approach is an interdisciplinary approach that suggests that “context” is important to language analysis. It proposes a multi-layered concept of "context" that includes: not only the immediate language (for example, the linguistic aspects used to describe particular groups/individuals) but also the situational context (for example, where the speech event takes place and whether it is a formal or an informal event). It also includes examining the social and historical contexts surrounding the language used (for example, the historical and social background of the intended audience).
The theory of Visual Grammar looks into the communicative functions of images. Like verbal language, images can have communicative meanings. An image, for example, may describe an action in what is called by Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996) a “narrative visual structure”. Or it may describe attributes of a person or object (take a map as an example) in what is named as “analytical structures” (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996: 45-87).
In the chapter I wrote, I propose that a synergy of the Discourse Historical Approach and the theory of Visual Grammar will benefit from the methodological rigour of the two approaches and enable us to analyse both verbal and visual language. I apply the two approaches to televangelism (i.e. preaching religion via the Internet/television) which has become popular over the past few decades.
One reason I am super excited about the book and my contribution to it is that it features writings by well-known scholars in multi-modal research such as Diane Mavers in the UK and Hartmut Stöckl in Austria.
When I received the book in the post, the first thing I did was to take a photo of the book with the lovely postcard I received from the editor. It features a painting by Margaret Sara Carpenter called The Sisters, displayed in Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The photo is taken in my room in Kirkham before moving to my ever cutest city- Lancaster!
