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    K. O'Halloran: Multimodal Discourse Analysis: Systemic FUNCTIONAL PERSPECTIVES. Continuum, 2004

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    This book provides an in-depth exploration of multimodal discourse analysis from a systemic functional perspective. Each chapter analyzes a different text or discourse, such as architecture, museum exhibits, advertisements, and textbooks, to understand how meaning is constructed through multiple modes of communication. The book extends systemic functional linguistics to non-linguistic modes and expands the definition of "text" to include buildings, films, and other multimodal artifacts. It serves to both broaden the theoretical tools of systemic functional analysis and widen the scope of linguistic research.

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    K. O'Halloran: Multimodal Discourse Analysis: Systemic FUNCTIONAL PERSPECTIVES. Continuum, 2004

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    This book provides an in-depth exploration of multimodal discourse analysis from a systemic functional perspective. Each chapter analyzes a different text or discourse, such as architecture, museum exhibits, advertisements, and textbooks, to understand how meaning is constructed through multiple modes of communication. The book extends systemic functional linguistics to non-linguistic modes and expands the definition of "text" to include buildings, films, and other multimodal artifacts. It serves to both broaden the theoretical tools of systemic functional analysis and widen the scope of linguistic research.

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    This book provides an in-depth exploration of multimodal discourse analysis from a systemic functional perspective. Each chapter analyzes a different text or discourse, such as architecture, museum exhibits, advertisements, and textbooks, to understand how meaning is constructed through multiple modes of communication. The book extends systemic functional linguistics to non-linguistic modes and expands the definition of "text" to include buildings, films, and other multimodal artifacts. It serves to both broaden the theoretical tools of systemic functional analysis and widen the scope of linguistic research.

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    42 views3 pages

    K. O'Halloran: Multimodal Discourse Analysis: Systemic FUNCTIONAL PERSPECTIVES. Continuum, 2004

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    envi
    This book provides an in-depth exploration of multimodal discourse analysis from a systemic functional perspective. Each chapter analyzes a different text or discourse, such as architecture, museum exhibits, advertisements, and textbooks, to understand how meaning is constructed through multiple modes of communication. The book extends systemic functional linguistics to non-linguistic modes and expands the definition of "text" to include buildings, films, and other multimodal artifacts. It serves to both broaden the theoretical tools of systemic functional analysis and widen the scope of linguistic research.

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    REVIEWS 335

    Washbrook, D. A. 1999. ‘Orients and occidents: Colonial discourse theory and the historiography of the
    British Empire’, in R. Winks (ed.): The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume V: Historiography. Oxford:
    Oxford University Press, pp. 596–611.
    Wertsch, J. and K. O’Connor. 1994. ‘Multivoicedness in historical representation: American college
    students’ accounts of the origins of the United States’, in J. Wertsch (ed.) Special Issue on Historical
    Representation, Journal of Narrative and Life History 4: 295–309.

    K. O’Halloran: MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS: SYSTEMIC

    Downloaded from http://applij.oxfordjournals.org/ at The Univesity of Calgary on May 4, 2012


    FUNCTIONAL PERSPECTIVES. Continuum, 2004.

    As the title of this book promises, it offers an in-depth exploration of a


    variety of texts and discourses from a multimodal systemic functional
    perspective. Each chapter offers a grounded approach to a particular aspect of
    multimodal discourse analysis. The chapters socially situate the text(s) being
    discussed to make connections across the design (social organization) of a
    text, a culture’s knowledge of itself and the world. The book focuses on the
    multimodal research of colleagues at the National University of Singapore,
    much of which is influenced by the theoretical work of Michael O’Toole.
    This makes a good contribution to understanding how multimodality is being
    developed differently within different contexts.
    The book is organized into three sections, each of which attends to the
    question of how to research the configuration of modes in a particular
    medium: the first section is concerned with ‘three dimensional material
    objects in space’, the second with ‘electronic media and film’. Leaving the
    more traditional medium to the last, the third section is focused on ‘print
    media’. Each of these sections consists of three research-based chapters
    that offer a detailed multimodal analysis of a ‘text’. Each section also
    develops and extends systemic functional theory by its application beyond
    the linguistic.
    Chapter 1 by O’Toole opens the first section on three-dimensional material
    objects in space. He stretches the three Hallidayan semantic meta-functions
    (Experiential, Interpersonal and Textual) over the Sydney Opera House in
    search of a grammar of architecture which will help him better understand
    architectural practices as they are located socially. In Chapter 2, Pang offers
    a multimodal analysis of an exhibition titled ‘From Colony to Nation’ at
    the National History Museum of Singapore. The author uses a systemic
    functional approach to explore the construction of historical discourses.
    Safeyaton Alias presents a semiotic study of Singapore’s Orchard Road and
    the Marriott Hotel in Chapter 3 in order to examine the physical instantia-
    tion of economic and political discourses.
    Section two deals with electronic media. This section opens with Baldry’s
    discussion of an online computer-based system, the Multimodal Corpus
    Authoring system. Baldry examines the organization of phases and
    336 REVIEWS

    transitions within car advertisements—as a type of film text—with a view to


    identifying typical (gendered) patterns and functions in the multimodal
    realization of meaning. In part this focus relates to the reconstruction
    of the generic structure of film genres with a stress on multimodal
    components (incl. the rhythm of a film, its use of visual components, the
    sound track, etc.), all of which interplay to realize the meaning of a text).
    In Chapter 5, O’Halloran explores the potential of video-editing software for
    multimodal analysis, with an example analysis of two short extracts from
    Polanski’s film Chinatown. Bringing systemic functional theory together with
    film theory, she proposes the use of computer technology for the semiotic

    Downloaded from http://applij.oxfordjournals.org/ at The Univesity of Calgary on May 4, 2012


    analysis of dynamic visual imagery in visual meaning making. In Chapter 6,
    Kok offers a theoretical model of hypertext constructions of reality and
    meaning. The model is demonstrated by applying it to the analysis of the
    website of Singapore’s Ministry of Education.
    The third and final section concerned with print media opens with
    Chapter 7 by Cheong Yin Yuen. This chapter concentrates on the construal
    of ideational meaning in print advertisements and aims to contribute to
    the development of a theoretical framework for looking at adverts that
    incorporate visual and linguistic elements. Guo Libo examines aspects of
    multimodality in a biology textbook in Chapter 8 with a focus on schematic
    drawings and graphs and how meanings are instantiated in linguistic and
    visual semiotic resources. In the book’s final chapter, Lim Fei sets out to
    develop an integrated multi-semiotic model for understanding how meanings
    are realized in the interaction of linguistic and visual semiotic resources.
    This edited volume shows the great potential of linguistic tools and
    practices when taken and reshaped for use in a multimodal context. At the
    same time, it highlights some of the potential constraints of doing so. One of
    these is the utter intensity of the research process when research efforts are
    expanded across more than one mode. I also think that the scale and level
    of analysis, when one moves from linguistic text to the (literally enormous)
    Sydney Opera house, might demand some further thinking. In any case, one
    of the ways in which the book extends systemic functional analysis is by
    questioning and challenging what is a text. A narrow linguistic definition
    of text is imploded from the outset by O’Toole’s analysis of the Sydney Opera
    House in Chapter 1 (p. 11).
    As in language, the Collocational potential of architectural elements—
    their Conjunction in rooms and floors and buildings, their Reference to each
    other and to their environment—is what makes them into coherent and
    usable ‘texts’.
    The book expands the notion of text in an exciting way to include specific
    buildings, urban landscapes, film, hypertext, alongside the more prosaic
    inclusion of print adverts and textbooks. The volume thus highlights the
    potential of new ways of looking at the world as well as the usefulness
    of tools that have been around for some time in helping us to do this.
    In this way, this edited volume serves to extend the theoretical tools of
    REVIEWS 337

    systemic functional linguistics as well as the scope of linguistic research


    objects.
    The book’s connection with linguistics is clear and as such it might be
    more immediately appealing to some linguists than some other books on
    multimodality. In this way the book offers a specific way into multimodality.
    It builds on the tools of systemic functional linguists and is therefore useful
    to those linguists with knowledge of systemic functional grammar who
    want to broaden their scope to the multimodal without feeling that they
    need to learn a completely new analytical process and language. The book is
    also ‘gentler’ on linguistics than some other publications in the domain of

    Downloaded from http://applij.oxfordjournals.org/ at The Univesity of Calgary on May 4, 2012


    multimodal inquiry, in that it continues to accord a central place to language
    and maintains the analytical language of linguistics. The assumption of some
    knowledge of a systemic functional approach may pose a problem for
    some readers (especially those less familiar with a Hallidayan framework).
    However, I think it is a bold (and ‘right’) editorial move to make
    multimodality the starting point and to downplay the need to sketch the
    whole history of systemic functional linguistics prior to the multimodal turn.
    The overall structure of the book works well and the introduction is useful
    in mapping why this publication is needed now. The book does, however,
    sweep across a large and varied terrain and I think it could have been
    structured a little more to help the reader navigate the ideas it collects up.
    For example, short introductions to each of the sections would have been
    welcome, as I thought there was much to be said about the ideas that ran
    across each section and nowhere to say it. Similarly, a conclusion would
    also have been useful to tie some of the threads woven across the chapters
    together into bundles of ideas—especially a conclusion that establishes
    connections rather than one that bangs the nail in the discursive coffin.

    Final version received March 2006


    Reviewed by Carey Jewitt
    Institute of Education, London, UK
    doi:10.1093/applin/aml002

    J. Gibbons and E. Ramı́rez: MAINTAINING A MINORITY


    LANGUAGE. A CASE STUDY OF HISPANIC TEENAGERS.
    Multilingual Matters, 2004.

    Maintaining a Minority Language by J. Gibbons and E. Ramı́rez explores


    Spanish language maintenance among second-generation Hispanic teenagers
    in Sydney, Australia. The book brings together five semi-independent studies
    that measure proficiency and examine societal, interpersonal, and attitudinal

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