An empirical approach to multimodality
4.1 An outlook on deploying genre
The following sections highlight two important issues in deploying genre as a the-oretical concept. Section 4.1.1 explores the challenges that arise from genre as an interdisciplinary theoretical concept. Afterwards, Section 4.1.2 follows up with a discussion of the role of criteria in a definition of genre.
4.1.1 On the notion of genre
Any investigation involving genre needs to acknowledge the interdisciplinary na-ture of the theoretical concept, because different disciplines assign genre with def-initions that reflect the discipline’s research interests. Consequently, these defini-tions may be incompatible with each other. The resulting diversity of definidefini-tions may be illustrated in the range of disciplines, which have deployed the notion of genre.
These disciplines include, for instance, media and communication studies (Fair-clough 1995, 2003; Frow 2006), the study of rhetoric (Miller 1984; Bazerman 1988;
Berkenkotter and Huckin 1995), literature (Fowler 1982), library and information sciences (Andersen 2009) and film (Altman 1999). Within linguistics, genre has been deployed as a part of a range of different approaches, such as English for Specific Purposes (hereafter ESP, see e.g. Swales 1990; Bhatia 1993) and systemic-functional linguistics (hereafter SFL, see e.g. Ventola 1987; Paltridge 1997; Christie and Martin 1997; Martin and Rose 2008; Rose 2011; Martin 2012). The emerging field of multimodal research has also applied the concept of genre in the work of van Leeuwen (2005a,b), Baldry and Thibault (2005), Lemke (2005), Held (2005) and Bateman (2008, forthcoming), to name a few.
If the discussion is limited to linguistics for the time being, it may be observed that the different approaches also agree on certain characteristics of genre. For example, both ESP and SFL consider genre to be a structured, context-dependent and staged process, which works towards a specific communicative goal. In addi-tion, the organising principle of linguistic genre is considered to be linear. How-ever, with the advance to multimodality, these underlying characteristics need to be reconsidered carefully.
For instance, the principle of linearity becomes problematic — particularly from the perspective of structure — because not all multimodal artefacts are de-signed to be read in a linear way (Waller 2012). Furthermore, it should be noted that in addition to disciplinary differences, the use of genre may also vary within a discipline. Consider, for instance, the following uses of genre in multimodal research:
“Linguistics has seemingly failed to recognise covers as a genre ...”
(Held 2005, p. 173)
“Advertising is one of the principal genres ...” (Hopearuoho and Ven-tola 2009, p. 183)
“Newly emergent media such as internet web-pages — an innately hy-bridic genre ...” (Tan 2010, p. 93)
In the above examples, genre is used to describe three different phenomena: a part of a multimodal artefact (cover), social and economic activity (advertising), and a medium (web-page) — a concept that already carries a considerable theoret-ical load by itself (Constantinou 2005). Nothing can obviously prevent the use of genre in these contexts, but at the same time, it is also a perfectly valid question to ask what exactly genre contributes to the analysis in these cases (cf. Freadman 2012). As a consequence of the haphazard use, the theorisation of genre within multimodal research has been limited to theoretical discussions (Lemke 2005) or methodological proposals (Bateman 2008).
In some aspects, the situation of genre in multimodal research resembles that of linguistic genre, as described by Bawarshi and Reiff (2010, p. 3):
[T]he termgenreitself remains fraught with confusion, competing with popular theories of genre as text type and as an artificial system of clas-sification. Part of the confusion has to do with whether genres merely sort and classify the experiences, events, and actions they represent (and are therefore conceived of as labels or containers for meaning), or whether genres reflect, help shape, and even generate what they rep-resent in culturally defined ways (and therefore play a critical role in meaning-making).
This discussion inevitably leads to a point where it is necessary to present the question: what is genre good for in multimodal research?
According to Forceville (2007, p. 1237), genre should complement the detailed multimodal analyses by providing a more abstract level of analysis. He recom-mends starting with carefully circumscribed corpora, in order to identify the “sig-nificant clusters of variables” for each genre. This means that an effective concept of genre should be able to make predictions about the content and structure of a multimodal artefact. Genre should inform the analyst of the artefact’s particular characteristics, their frequency and variation. In this way, the concept of genre would support the detailed analyses, allowing them to fill in the details of the ‘big picture’ of multimodality.
In this chapter, I attempt to formulate a definition of genre that matches the above requirements. Yet to achieve a robust definition, the concept of genre needs to be grounded in the notion of structure. The GeM model, which was described in Chapter 3, is geared towards this purpose and provides the foundation for
this work. The notion of multimodal structure, in turn, needs to be connected to the communicative functions of the tourist brochure. Finally, the multimodal structure has to provide the criteria for comparing the tourist brochures: this will be discussed in the following section.
4.1.2 The role of criteria in defining genre
At the core of genre, there needs to be a clearly defined set of criteria for deter-mining its members. As the criteria is used for admission to genre membership, it needs to be rooted in observations made in the artefact structure. Most impor-tantly, the criteria has to be sufficiently constrained. For instance, Martin and Rose (2008, p. 132) discuss different linguistic recount genres, whose key linguistic features they describe as follows:
1. Personal recount: serial time; 1st person (and 3rd); specific participants.
2. Autobiographical recount: episodic time; 1st person (and 3rd); specific partic-ipants.
3. Biographical recount: episodic time; 3rd person (specific); other specific and generic participants.
4. Historical recount: episodic time; 3rd person; mainly generic participants (but specific ‘great men’).
The above criteria may not only be used to assign a text into a recount genre, but to establish relations between these genres. Consider, for example, the role of time in the recount genres. The first person narrative of a personal recount sets this genre apart from the other genres, in which the narrative episodes take place at different points in episodic time. In short, narrative time provides one possible criterion for establishing the characteristics of a genre.
However, with the move to multimodality, defining criteria for genre member-ship becomes challenging due to the contribution of multiple semiotic modes. At the same time, the lack of reliable criteria denies us the variables for comparing the artefacts. Therefore, no attempt should be made to identify a priori crite-ria for the tourist brochures. In contrast, the GeM-annotated corpus provides an opportunity to define the criteria from scratch — and based on observation — provided that we can establish the kind of criteria needed. The starting point is nevertheless clear: the analytical layers of the GeM model provide the candidates for the criteria.
Defining the possible sources for criteria may be informed by previous multi-modal research. For instance, Kv˚ale (2010) has studied the role of “image-text-complexes” and their role in describing the activities and locations in the tourist brochures (see also Section 3.5.3), whereas Baldry and Thibault (2005, Chapter 1) have investigated the role of multimodal “clusters” in the formation of genre.
Both of these studies point in the same direction: the content and its organisation in a layout is one possible source for criteria (see also Hiippala 2013). The follow-ing step is to consider which layers of the GeM model can be used to investigate the organisation of layout and content. In this case, the investigation should be naturally directed towards the layout and rhetorical layers.
Alternatively, comparing artefacts in the data may involve quantifying a single analytical layer of the GeM model. For instance, Taboada and Habel (2013) use RST to investigate the distribution of rhetorical relations in different multimodal artefacts (for RST, see Section 3.2.3). In the tourist brochures, a similar approach could be used to study the distribution of RST relations in different contexts, by comparing the rhetorical relations to describe destinations, locations and events (Hiippala 2012a, pp. 116-117). However, as I will show later, the rhetorical rela-tions are best studied in connection with the other analytical layers for an informed view of discourse structure.
To sum up, carefully-defined criteria plays an important role in successfully applying the notion of genre to the data. Without criteria, the concept of genre is reduced to a mere label. This shall be kept in mind, as I now proceed to discuss previous genre research to establish how it may inform the work undertaken in this dissertation. The discussion begins with the rhetorical studies of genre.