As leadership discourses in higher education are increasingly being mediated online, texts previously reserved for staff are now being made available in the public domain. As such, these texts become accessible for study, critique and evaluation. Additionally, discourses previously confined to the written domain are now increasingly multimodal. Thus, an approach is required that is capable of relating detailed, complex multimodal discourse analyses to broader sociocultural perspectives to account for the complex meaning-making practices that operate in online leadership discourses. For (...) this purpose, a digital multimodal discourse approach is proposed and illustrated via a small-scale case study of the online leadership discourse of an Australian university. The analysis of two short video texts demonstrates how a digital multimodal discourse perspective facilitates the identification of key multimodal systems used for meaning-making in online communication, how meaning arises through combinations of semiotic choices, and how the results of multimodal discourse analysis using digital technology can reveal larger sociocultural patterns – in this case, divergent leadership styles and approaches as reflected in online discourse, at a time of immense change within the higher education sector. (shrink)

Previous studies on legitimation, multimodality and political discourse by researchers, such as Van Leeuwen, Van Dijk and Mackay, have suggested different but supplementary methods of legitimation analysis by providing a number of analytical frameworks. Multimodal legitimation research, however, seems to be in need of a better conflation of the theoretical backgrounds of disciplines, such as narratology. This article focuses on the multimodal discourse of three political advertisements of the political party New Democracy, filmed for the needs of the Greek legislative (...) election of January 2015. What is investigated is the multimodal means by which New Democracy’s president, and Prime Minister at the time, Antonis Samaras attempted to legitimise his candidacy. In this article, I use the six-layer framework proposed by Mackay for multimodal legitimation analyses and I argue that multimodal legitimation research can benefit and get enhanced from the use of narratology and its analytical categories, such as perspective. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhile the sonic logo for McDonald’s i’m lovin’ it campaign has been widely distributed and highly praised, little is known about the actual characteristics and meaning potentials of this pa...

This paper uses a social semiotic perspective to analyze Donald Trump’s domination of media coverage of the US presidential campaign from 16 June 2015, when he announced his candidacy for nomination as the Republican candidate until 8 November 2016, when he was elected as President of the United States. The paper argues that one of the keys to Donald Trump’s domination of media coverage was that, in presenting himself and his agenda, he foregrounded interpersonal meaning by making himself the focus (...) of attention of the campaign through strategies that invaded various semiotic spaces to form a “sub-semiosphere” of Trump dogma. The effects of this were that what he did and what he said captured the majority of media attention at the expense of his opponents, enabling him to win the election, despite his complete lack of background experience as a politician. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article investigates deixis-based chronotopic framing across a corpus of 90 songs selected based on their top-ranking positions on the UK song charts over the period of 8 years. The present study combines some tools in linguistic approach to genre analysis and some concepts drawn from pragmatics and Critical Discourse Analysis, as an analytic framework. Quantitative and qualitative focus was laid on ideologically coded thematic leitmotifs and chronotopic interplay through spatio-temporal deictic patterns across the case-study lyrics. It was found that (...) there are significant points of commonality between the lyrics in terms of thematic strands as well as chronotope-bounded deictic features which warrants the classification of popular songs as a verbally distinct genre with its own ideologically charged discursive practices characterised by political apathy, and which can in part explain the target audience's uptake of this type of songs. (shrink)

This article intends to build bridges between two recent trends within Critical Discourse Studies as exemplified by cognitive linguistics and multimodality. Thus, the postulates of spatial cognition will be followed to do an analysis of the musical re-contextualization of Barack Obama's New Hampshire 2008 speech. In Will.i.am's music video ‘Yes, we can’, uploaded on YouTube under the username WeCan08, we can listen to a song whose lyrics are made of different extracts from Obama's speech. This type of communicative strategy results (...) in a multiple re-contextualization of the political speech. The effectiveness of the musical video can be explained by identifying it as a blended mental space incorporating elements of the text-world, the music-world and visual-world. (shrink)