Verbal Communication by Rocci Andrea Saussure Louis de

Author:Rocci, Andrea,Saussure, Louis de
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2016-04-21T16:00:00+00:00

2Social issues

The main factors driving the pursuance of investigations of multimodal resource integration at this time lie in the widespread and very diverse communicative purposes for which multimodal artefacts are being mobilised in society. As suggested above, there are now few domains where some kind of multimodal integration is not an issue. Questions of the use and consequences of varied presentational forms appearing in distinct media are thus on several research agendas. One point to be emphasised as we proceed is that appropriate responses to this task will often have to go beyond some of the disciplinary boundaries that have formed over the past thirty of forty years in the ‘area’. This applies both to the kind of data considered, which in the case of linguistics has tended to marginalise non-verbal aspects, and to the range of methods that are applied, challenging traditional distinctions between approaches that study more the ‘context’ of communication (mass media, communication studies, etc.) and approaches that study the internal organisation of those artefacts being exchanged in communication (linguistics, psycholinguistics, semiotics, etc.).

Approaches that have arisen out of practical situations of communication have long been more flexible in this respect and have been less hampered by pre-decided disciplinary restrictions on subject matter or methodologies. Thus, for example, the investigations of Orlikowski, Yates and colleagues concerning business communication have, from the outset, accepted a broad range of modal contributions as germane to their work, identifying observable features both of the communicative situation including “text formatting devices, such as lists and headings, and devices for structuring interactions at meetings, such as agenda and chairpersons” and of the “communication medium (e.g., pen and paper, telephone, or face to face)” itself (Orlikowski and Yates 1994: 544). Both business and scientific communications now accept, and often even expect, multimodal artefacts as the medium of exchange. Many traditional business genres, such as annual reports, are nowadays considered to be essentially multimodal and achieve appeal to, and persuade, their readers via photographs, graphs, tables and so on. This trend probably reaches its most prominent exponents (although still contentious: cf. Tufte 2006) in the widespread use of presentational forms such as Microsoft’s PowerPoint or Apple’s Keynote.

Other areas affected by progressively multimodal development include bureaucratic communication such as forms, both traditional print-based and online newspapers, and many kinds of citizen-related information offerings, such as health advice (e.g., van Weert et al. 2011). In the first area, awareness concerning the need to present information in an intelligible manner has risen considerably in recent years, and this has in turn led to campaigns and legislation to ensure improved design of previously often impenetrable (non-)communicative artefacts. In this regard, improved deployment of typography and layout has already had a dramatic effect in several countries (cf. Jansen and Steehouder 1992; Delin et al. 2006), as has research based primarily on social science methodologies of usability and testing of recall of information (cf. Houts et al. 2006). An increasingly strong overlap with the areas of human-computer interface design and interface usability must also be recognised as interactions between users and documents now commonly occur online (cf.

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