A multimodal discourse analysis of food menus in English and Arabic

Abstract EN

The multimodal discourse analysis has attracted much more attention.

People were affected in the multimodality of discourse a long time ago, but it took time for researchers to recognize its importance.

Though language is an essential resource in discourse, yet it requires to coordinate with another resources in the act of meaning-making.

Thus, discourse analysis should take into consideration other modalities.

The study aims at investigating the textual and the visual resources of food menus in two different cultural and linguistic contexts, namely, English and Arabic from semiotics perspectives.

To get the study aims, ten food restaurant menus have chosen from English as well as Arabic, divided equally into five menus for each linguistic context.

A multi-analytic model has adopted for analysing the selected data.

It has based on Beasley and Danesi's (2002) semiotics framework, Scollon and Scollon's (2003) geosemiotics, and Kress and van Leeuwen's (2006) multimodal social semiotics.

Finally, the study sums the conclusions.

The qualitative analysis has selected to reveal that the food menus of the two linguistic texts utilize the same textual and the visual resources for the promotional purposes.