Pragmatic Macrocategories and Microstrategies in Research Project Homepages: Meaning-Making through Verbal and Visual Devices; 1st ed.

Pascual, Daniel

En : Explorations in Internet Pragmatics: Intentionality, Identity, and Interpersonal Interaction
2024
Brill Berlin
ISBN: 978-90-04-69442-2
Pp: 67–91

Resumen: The visual mode has gained a powerful status in meaning making-processes within digitally-mediated communicative situations. This turn towards multimodality has clear implications for pragmatic analyses, as the combination of visual and verbal texts conveys users’ intents in complementary and expansive ways, and is also pervasive within contexts of scholarly and scientific digital discourse. One such salient scenario is research project websites, where international research groups provide information about the development and results of their funded projects. Within these websites, homepages are the window through which users access the project content and where meaningful combinations of visual and verbal features are primarily showcased. This chapter focuses on the study of data-driven pragmatic strategies deployed on 24 homepages from research project websites to identify research groups’ intents and analyze them from a multimodal perspective. The pragmatic strategies identified revolve around three macrocategories: informative, promotional and interactional, and function within prototypical clusters that structure these homepages (e.g. Project information, News, Partners). Strategies are illustrated with examples from the data sample to observe how visual and verbal devices (e.g. logos, icons, pictures) give way to meaning potentials in the clusters of research project homepages that contribute to increasing the project impact and the research group’s visibility.

DOI: 10.1163/9789004694453_005