Multimodal genre and cross-linguistic comparison : pack messages

Abstract

This paper shows that the multimodal messages on fast moving consumer goods packaging constitute a genre of text. More specifically, they may be seen as a form of colony discourse (Hoey 2001). It is shown that the contribution that multimodal resources make across whole texts and the social nature of genre recognition and instantiation make genre a useful way to approach the cross-linguistic comparison of pack messages. The paper presents a critical discussion of influential linguistic accounts of genre and shows that these might be usefully extended in order to accommodate multimodal texts by incorporating insights from typographic research. The paper ends by presenting a new synthesis of these various approaches to genre which will provide the framework for ongoing empirical analysis.