Multimodal argumentation: association of words and images in the construction of the argumentative dimension of discourse

Abstract

Considering that discourse emerges from the multisemiotic complexity that characterizes language and, for this reason, involves different dimensions in the study of discourse materialized in texts, in this article we (re) formulated some reflections on the association between word and image as a strategy of argumentation. We assume that from the complete association between verbal and nonverbal elements, where one seems to replace the other because they have an equivalent informativeness, to the complete dissociation between these elements, where the word seems to negate the image and vice versa, there is a spectrum of association possibilities aimed at reasoning through the relationship between different modalities. To illustrate these considerations, the corpus analyzed in this article consists of seven journalistic texts of an informative nature published in the social media of media entities and on their websites. The adopted theoretical framework is mainly based on the semiolinguistic discourse theory (CHARAUDEAU, 2005; 2007; 2008), associated with the proposal of the analysis of multisemiotic texts by Kress and van Leewen (2006), as well as on previous studies in which we take as a starting point the methodological analysis of multimodal argumentation (MARCHON e GARCIA, 2020; SILVA e MARCHON, 2021). The results of the analysis point to the possibility of understanding multimodal argumentation arranged in a continuum, which can be applied to other research involving different discourse genres.