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Multimodal Discourse offers a theoretical framework for the study of communication in the modern world of multimedia. The book helps students of linguistics, cultural studies, and communication as well as journalists, photographers, designers, and others who work practically in the field of communication and design, to understand and differentiate the distinct levels of mass communication and their interaction. The authors also give an overview of the development of communication and discourse and show how this development is influenced by overall changes in society and social life. All the definitions of theoretical concepts and notions are further explained and illustrated by a great variety of examples. Linguists have shown that discourse is not only used and expressed in and/or by language; Kress & van Leeuwen also apply the term to music, architecture, and many other domains of culture. The notion of modes, however, is explained only in a very abstract way as "semiotic resources which allow the simultaneous realization of discourses and types of (inter)action" (p. 21). Media, on the other hand, are described as the material resources being used for the production. Examples of modes mentioned by the authors are music, language, and images. The medium is supposed to be the material, such as a book (6).
In the first chapter, four different levels of communication that contribute meaning are introduced and defined: discourse, design, production, and distribution. The authors explain their concepts of multimodality (language, images, and sound can be used for the same discourse), stratal configurations (the division of labor and the different levels), and experiential meaning potential ("the idea that material signifiers have a meaning potential that derives from what we do when we articulate them" [22]; a singer may use a special sound quality, for example). The last term defined is "provenance": "Signs may be 'imported' from one context ... into another, in order to signify the ideas and values associated with that other context by those who do the importing" (23); an example of provenance is to name a perfume "Paris" (23). The authors argue against the traditional linguistic assumption that meaning is made only once by stating that multimodal texts make meaning in multiple articulations within a single instance. Discourses are defined as "socially constructed knowledges of (some aspect...