Multimodal discourse analysis

[Ian Roderick]

Is there anyone who is working with multimodal texts using Kress and van Leeuwen's 'grammar of visual design' that might have a moment?

I am working with a small collection of magazine ads and I am wondering if the human figure in the image might function as an non-transactional actor at the 'level' of the image but at the multimodal level function instead as the goal? The verbal text refers only to a training system (and what it can do for the nonspecific 'student') of which the human figure is presumably the product of such training and thus, at a multimodal level, be in fact the 'goal'. Or is it simply the case that understood as a multimodal text, the figure in the ad does indeed function as a goal and not an actor.

If anyone can help clarify this for me, it would be most appreciated. Monomodality was so much easier...

Ian Roderick
Communication Studies
Wilfrid Laurier University