Equinox Analyzing the Media: A Systemic Functional Approach

Analyzing the Media provides twelve original studies from established scholars in the field of SFL and/or multimodality as well as from young scholars who have already delivered remarkable contributions to the discipline. The volume starts with an introduction to media studies from an SFL perspective. The first part of the volume then explores different functional approaches to analyzing journalistic genres (e.g., reports, editorials, letters to the editor, popular science features) with a clear emphasis on the examination of linguistic/semiotic textures, which are studied in terms of a range of aspects such as generic structure, culture, cognition or language contrast. The second half of the volume looks at processes of convergence and change within the medial landscape, e.g., at the transfer of a genre from one medium to another and at the concomitant linguistic/semiotic changes. It explores how long-established media genres, such as advertising and branding, have changed over the years and adapted to shifting media logics, how the new social media have led to new emerging linguistic practices as in internet forums, how generic conventions and linguistic styles are adopted and imported in related or neighbouring genres and media such as comic, TV-series and film, how specific multimodal textures, such as smell, can be co-deployed with other meaning making resources (verbal, visual, spatial) to create specific effects for particular situations, e.g., in open-house viewing events, and how Cultural Historical Activity Theory, an action oriented theory that does not integrate a model of social semiosis, can be fruitfully combined with SFL theory to explore hitherto unbeaten paths in human-computer interaction.