Rhetorically weak: conceptual photographs

As I observed above, not all photographs in the data are accompanied by captions.

In fact, many of the photographs stand alone in the brochure structure, without an explicit rhetorical relation to any specific segment of text or another image. I refer to these photographs as conceptual, suggesting that their function is to provide the reader with a general view of the portrayed destination or location and the abstract values and meanings associated with the target of description. Below, I will show how these conceptual photographs are integrated into the multimodal structure of the tourist brochures.

Figure 7.9 shows a configuration which integrates multiple conceptual pho-tographs into the multimodal structure of the brochure using the header (s-4.04).

Like in the illustrated descriptions described in Section 7.2.1, the header is the only rhetorical ‘point of contact’ between the photographs and the accompanying text-flow, which provides a detailed description of the location (not shown, contin-ues with the dashed titleline). This description does not, however, establish an explicit connection with the photographs. Not surprisingly, several cohesive ties

page-6-photos

s-4.16: Photo: Child s-4.17: Photo: Beach

page-5-photos

RESTATEMENT

s-4.01: Photo: Path s-4.02: Photo: Rocks s-4.03: Photo: Children page-5-description

s-4.04: Pihlajasaari

Figure 7.9: Conceptual photographs in HFT 1984

may be nevertheless identified between the text and the photographs, exemplified by nominal groups such as sandy beaches (cf. s-4.17) and beautiful footpaths (cf.

s-4.01).

However, I do not consider these cohesive ties strong enough to justify a claim that a rhetorical relation holds between the text segments and the photographs.

Firstly, the GeM RST cannot bring the source of cohesion under analytical control, because the analysis does not extend below an orthographic sentence or a sentence fragment (see the list of base units in Table 3.1). For this dissertation, the benefits of the trade-off between the analytical granularity and the constraining notion of structure were discussed extensively in Chapter 3. Drawing a relation between the two segments would require loosening the analytical criteria, and thus work directly against the reasons for adopting the GeM model in the first place.

Secondly, if the text-flow were wrapped around the photographs, a rhetorical relation between the two might be more plausible. In this case, however, the photographs belong to different layout nodes in the hierarchy, as indicated by the bounding boxes in Figure 7.9. Moreover, the text and the photographs also occupy different areas in the area model.

What can then be said about the conceptual photographs without any addi-tional concepts — such as cohesion — to describe their content and interaction with language? In fact, many useful observations can be made while working with the notion of structure. For example, we now know that the conceptual photographs are incorporated into the artefact structure with relatively weak rhetorical sig-nalling. At the same time, Molina and Esteban (2006, p. 1045) have shown that the photographs have a considerable effect on forming an image of the destination.

Table 7.3: Photographs in the rhetorical structure Identifier Year Photographs RST relations

HFT 1984 28 6

HFT 1988 28 26

GNO 2008 11 1

HDB 1972 10 9

H45 2000 10 5

BNO 2006 10 1

HVG 2008 8 8

SSH 1986 7 7

HFT 1967 5 5

HDB 1969 5 5

TGH 1980 5 5

WEH 1995 5 4

WEH 1998 5 5

HFT 1972 4 4

HYW 1999 4 4

SMF 2001 4 1

WDH 2006 3 2

SHE 2002 2 1

WHE 2003 2 2

I would argue that the contrast between weak signalling and high impact of the conceptual photographs results from their established function in the genre of a tourist brochure. To put it simply: the photographs can convey an image of the destination, location or event without being tightly integrated in the rhetorical structure of the tourist brochure. In contrast, when the designers want to highlight specific visual content, this may be achieved by integrating the photographs into the multimodal structure as captioned photographs and illustrated descriptions.

An overview of the structural configurations involving photographs and their distribution across the data may be achieved by querying both layout and rhetor-ical layers of the GeM model. First, the realisation information component of the layout layer is used to identify the photographs, which are then matched with the corresponding RST segments in the rhetorical structure. The second step is to use the identified RST segments to find out how many RST spans the aforementioned segments participate in: I will clarify this issue below.

The results are shown in Table 7.3, which provides the identifier, the number of photographs and the number of multinuclear spans with a photograph as a

nucleus. Table 7.3 is listed in a descending order according to the number of photographs. Together, the number of photographs and associated RST spans can reveal the rhetorical configuration of the photographs. When a large number of photographs occurs in a few RST spans, the configuration in question is likely to be a cluster of conceptual photographs (HFT 1984). A close correspondence between the number of photographs and spans indicates that the photographs are in a direct relation with an RST segment. In many cases, these instances consist of the photographs and their captions (HFT 1988). In short, variation in the ratio between photographs and spans can be seen to reflect changes in the rhetoric-layout interface of the multimodal artefact (cf. Hiippala 2013).

Yet it is important to exercise caution, because Table 7.3 shows the results only for the brochureseries and not for individual double-pages in the annotated corpus (see Section 5.1.3.2). For the fully annotated brochures, such as HFT 1984 and 1988, the ratio between photographs and RST relations can be used to correctly infer the integration of photographs into the rhetorical structure. However, in some series — such asBNO 2006 and GNO 2008 — a cover page with conceptual photographs may skew the results, although the content pages would use text-flow (see e.g. Figure 3.10).

For the most part, the method described above provides an effortless way to initially identify whether the photographs form image-text-complexes or provide a conceptual representation of the destination. The difference, however, only emerges when the number of photographs is sufficiently high. Therefore, the brochures with a low number of photographs, participating in a correspondingly low number of spans need to be subjected to a closer analysis. To conclude, in-ferring the correct rhetorical configuration requires a sufficient amount of data;

otherwise a pattern cannot be detected.

To sum up the discussion of photographs, it can be said that they mainly par-ticipate in two types of structures in the tourist brochures. The first structure, an image-text-complex, provides a strong rhetorical relation between a photograph and the accompanying text. The structural simplicity of the image-text-complex allows its adaptation for a wide range of content types. In contrast to the image-text-complex, the second structure — a conceptual photograph — is rhetorically weak, but provides a powerful mechanism of representing the more abstract aspects of a destination. Lacking a strong, rhetorically signalled connection to other con-tent in the artefactstructure, conceptual photography is commonly used to convey an image of the destination and the values associated with it. Note, however, that this does not rule out the existence of cohesive ties between the photographs and text-flow, which are a common feature of semiosis in many genres.

This concludes the current discussion of the photographs and their functions and structure. I will discuss the structural configuration of photographs and

text-flow again in Section 8.1. I will now continue with other graphic elements, that is, the illustrations and maps.