| Keywords [eng] |
multimodality, multidimensional analysis, visual grammar, political news, multimodalumas, daugiamatė duomenų analizė, vizualų gramatika, plotinės naujienos |
| Abstract [eng] |
As news media outlets increasingly adopt a visually centric approach in their articles (Alonso et al., 2013: 370), previous media discourse research has primarily focused on identifying the visual or textual component, while some studies have combined both to conduct a multimodal analysis. Despite the scholarly interest in multimodal analysis of the news media outlets, to the best of my knowledge, there is a lack of research that not only compares language use and visual elements in news media articles but also examines the most prominent broadsheets in the UK to grasp a more globalised view of the projection of the UK news. Thus, the present study aims to analyse the texts and visuals of the political news articles and compare language density and cohesion with image usage published in three of the most widely read UK newspapers: The Independent, The Guardian, and The Times. To achieve this goal, a manually compiled corpus of 90 articles, 30 per each broadsheet, totaling 65,217 words and 127 embedded images, is analysed using two prominent frameworks. The linguistic variation of the chosen articles is examined using Douglas Biber’s (1988) Multidimensional Analysis, which comprises comparison across 6 parameters: 1) informational, 2) narration, 3) explicitness, 4) persuasion, 5) abstractions, and 6) elaboration. Meanwhile the images in the selected corpus are interpreted through the social semiotic framework as outlined by Kress & van Leeuwen’s (2006) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, specifically focusing on representational, interactive and compositional meanings. Once this quantitative, qualitative and analytical research has been carried out, the results of the study revealed that the three broadsheets share their journalistic strategies, especially when considering informational density, syntactic elaboration, and explicit reference; however, there are some differences found in narrative structure, persuasive expression, and abstractness. Moreover, the usage of visuals across the broadsheets reveals some differences. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the core elements of news articles and the techniques currently employed in news reporting in the UK, thereby creating greater awareness of the reliability of the news people encounter daily. |
