Multimodal Rhetoric of Acute Media Text

Abstract

The article considers the peculiarities of interaction of depictive and verbal modes in media texts on acute problems. The choice of the topic is conditioned by the situation that has developed in the media discourse of modern journalism. Visual methods of information transfer are beginning to gain more and more importance. The pictorial components of the message start to enter into a complex relationship with the verbal text, which in journalism contains many rhetorical methods. Due to this, the visual component acquires rhetorical connotations and increasingly shows an independent rhetorical potential. Of greatest interest for the study of multimodal rhetoric is the situation when the literal representation of an object turns out to be difficult and forces one to seek creative solutions, forming the individual potential of discourse. This happens in publications on acute social issues. As theoretical and methodological foundations, the most relevant are the conceptual developments of the classics of semiotics, who in their researches studied structural characteristics of visual codes and the interaction of these codes with the verbal text. Also of great interest are the theories of modern scientists working in the mainstream of discourse analysis and semiotics. The authors of the article follow this trend of a multimodal approach and, while analyzing representative examples, identify rhetorical techniques through which the sender of a multimodal message seeks to attract the attention of the audience and make the statement more convincing.

Cinema Feminist Agenda as a Source for Gender Studies

“…Media text is syncretic, multimodal and polycode. The symbolic nature of a film is not homogeneous and invites for a complex analysis (Tyazhlov et al, 2021). Loaded with figurative meanings, film manifests an ideal educational puzzle.…”