On the Analysis of Multimodal Documents at the Level of Pragmatics

A genuine comprehension of the process of human communication within organisations requires a detailed understanding of pragmatics. Accordingly, our aim here is to work towards a richer means of analysing and describing multimodal documents at the pragmatic level than is currently available within the framework of Organisational Semiotics. Our basic strategy is to take six of the most widely known aspects of discourse analysis as practised in linguistics and attempt to extend them to multimodal documents. These aspects are: (i) discourse organisation, (ii) order of presentation, (iii) communicative acts, (iv) adjacency sequences, (v) rhetorical relationships and (vi) affect. We find that all six of these aspects of discourse analysis are, indeed, capable of being extended to the analysis of multimodal discourse, at least in terms of basic principle. This encouraging result provides us with a viable starting-point for the analysis and description of multimodal documents at the level of pragmatics.