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.
About the Author: Martin Kaltenbacher is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Salzburg, Austria. In his research, he applies methods of Systemic Functional Linguistics and corpus linguistics to media discourse, language of tourism and news commentary. He co-edited books on Multimodality (Ventola, E., Charles, C., Kaltenbacher, M. Perspectives on Multimodality, Benjamins) and on Discourse Studies (Gruber, H., Kaltenbacher, M., Muntigl, P. Empirical Approaches to Discourse Analysis, Peter Lang). For the past three years he has been collaborating on a corpus based, international project called Styles of Persuasion in Europe, the aim of which is to explore similarities and differences in newspaper commentary across more than 200 European newspapers from 13 different European countries. Hartmut Stockl is full professor of English and Applied Linguistics at Salzburg University. His main research areas are in semiotics, text linguistics/stylistics, pragmatics and multimodal/visual communication. A recurrent theme surfacing in most of his work is a concern with a functional-linguistic theory of the multimodal text and effective analytical methods for uncovering its structures and styles. He is particularly interested in the linkage of language and image in modern media, typography and an aesthetic appreciation of advertising. His latest (co-)edited volumes are Bildlinguistik (2011, Erich Schmidt), Medientheorien und Multimodalitat (2011, Herbert von Halem), and Werbung - Keine Kunst!? (2012, Winter). He is the co-editor of the Handbook Language in Multimodal Contexts (2016, de Gruyter) in the 21-volume series Sprachwissen.