Delin, J. and Bateman, J. (2001)
Contrasting instructions: from grammar to layout.
Presented at the The 2nd International CoLLaTE Colloquium "Contrastive Analysis
and Linguistic Theory", Ghent, Belgium. September 2001.
| In this paper, we are concerned with an appropriate unit of comparison for comparative or contrastive textual studies. Traditionally, researchers investigate 'texts' in differing languages, focusing on their syntactic, semantic, and/or discourse-functional characteristics. More recently, the 'monomodality' (or 'monomediality') of this viewpoint has come under closer scrutiny (cf. Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001). In many cases it appears that the restriction to single 'modes'-e.g., the 'text' as traditionally conceived-may not be appropriate when moving between cultures and practices in which very different uses of available semiotic modes are made. There is a growing field of research in which the mutually supportive use of various communicative modes is assumed to play a fundamental role (cf. Royce, 1998; O'Halloran, 1999). We show with respect to linguistic and then multimodal analyses of instructional texts and wildlife guides the outline of a multimodal model, the GeM model, that offers a framework for the cross-linguistic comparison of document genres. |