A Multimodal Analysis of Genres of Economics Representation in EAP/ESP

Abstract

In contrast to an economics text from the nineteenth century, the contemporary text in economics is primarily multimodal (Baldry 2000, Lemke 1998a). Meaning is made in a specific social context through the combined use of diverse resources from different semiotic systems (language, depiction, graphics, and so on) rather than a single semiotic modality. The semiotic modes used in the text are culturally specific (Kress 2010: 8), that is, they come from a socially shared system of modes, and their meaning-making ways are easily identified and interpreted by the specialist sector of society the text addresses. The complex integration of resources in the economics text can be attributed not only to the use of advanced technologies but also to society’s capacity ‘to represent meaning in increasingly complex and often abstract combinations of the visual and verbal’ (Baldry and Thibault 2006: 63). Diagrams, graphs, charts and tables are typical meaning-making resources of the contemporary economics text and they contribute in their own specialized way to the overall text meaning. They constitute genres in their own right, that is, the genres of economics representation. Their form and function have also been affected by innovations in graphic design and computer technology, which allow for a greater level of abstraction and meaning compression than in the nineteenth-century economics text. Discussion of their evolution, characteristics and different ways of creating meaning in the economics text is an important aspect of a multimodal English for academic purposes/English for specific purposes (EAP/ESP) course.