THE CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES OF MULTIMEDIA DISCOURSE AS A TYPE OF MEDIA DISCOURSE

Abstract

This article seeks to analyse and compare the different definitions of the terms “discourse”, “text” and “media discourse”. The aim of the study is to specify the meaning of the abovementioned terms as well as investigate the characteristic features of multimedia discourse as a type of media discourse. The methods that have been used in this research are literature review, analogy and synthesis. The research findings have shown that there are two main approaches to defining “discourse”, namely as a text or collection of texts or as an interactive event. A distinction has also been made between the terms “discourse” and “text”, in that “discourse” is commonly viewed as an interactive process, while “text” is seen as its final product. Further examination of media discourse in particular has exposed a terminological problem when comparing the works of Ukrainian and foreign researchers. The reason for that is the different semantics of the concept “media” in the Ukrainian and English languages, namely using the word “media” only as a synonym of “mass-media” in Ukrainian, which in turn affects the understanding of the term “media discourse” as well. In order to solve this and to help avoid ambiguity, this paper offers to divide the concept “media discourse” into two hyponyms: mass-media discourse and multimedia discourse. The latter is best described as a highly multimodal entity. By analogy with the features of multimodal texts, a list of defining characteristics of multimedia discourse has been compiled, which includes: using several modes to create and to convey meaning; equal potential of each mode in meaning-making; achieving coherence and cohesion by using all the available modes; the importance of the social context in generating meaning.