Multimodal аnalysis in genre studies: Semiotics of the tourist booklet

The paper discusses the complex genre of tourist booklet as a fixed type of multimodal text that serves in a communicative situation of promoting a tourist product. This genre is a semiotically complex phenomenon, which conveys information through different semiotic systems. The methodological issues are posed as to a perspective model of genre analysis that would take into account the multimodal nature of genres. The author points to major hindrances that an analyst faces when doing multimodal analysis. The study focuses on discovering mechanisms of the interplay between verbal and visual components on semantic and formal levels, as well as showing how the elements of multimodal analysis can be targeted at various genre parameters. The booklets (85 items) for the study were collected in 2007–2019 in Australia, Great Britain, Germany, Poland, Russia and other countries. Methodologically, the paper draws on speech genre theory, semiotics, critical discourse analysis, and multimodal analysis. The claims are advanced that the tourist booklet has both obligatory and optional features, the visual component being obligatory. It is revealed that the colours of visuals can have factual and modal meanings embedded in them; photos convey precedent meanings; while using different semiotic codes, visual and verbal elements join the convergence relations and, thus, provide for genre coherence. The complex genre includes intertextual links between genres in its structure. These links may be of cross-code nature, since they are established between the elements of different semiotic systems, verbal and non-verbal. The conclusion is drawn that a consistent analytical model for multimodal genres has to be designed.