Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Image - Text Relations in International Hotel Homepages

Abstract

Tourism industry is a major source of income for many countries, including Thailand. Advertising plays a vital role in tourism and hospitality industry. It also has a significant impact on consumer decision making. Online advertising on a website is a vital tool and is widely used in tourism businesses as it helps them to advertise and market their products and services globally. Importantly, homepage is the most important part of the website in the future. So, it needs to be able to provide effective information and encourage potential customers to engage and revisit the website. Images are extremely important and widely used in tourism advertisement as they entice the viewers’ attention and help them construct an image of certain destinations, products and services in their mind. Therefore, effective use of visual element to accompany the textual content is important. This research aims to analyze status and logico-semantic relations between textual and visual elements located in the content area of international hotel homepages, and also to find out if there is any visual element that can be used to substitute the texts in these homepages. Twenty four hotel homepages from eight different countries were selected for the analysis. The system of status andlogico-semantic relations by Martinec & Salway (2005) was used as the analysis framework. The results of the present study show that there are 3 different status relations and 3 different logics-semantic relations found in this corpus. It is also found that there are certain visual images that can be used as text substitution.