Speaker: Professor Gaëlle Ferré, University of Poitiers, France
Abstract: "Argumentative discourse aims at influencing the opinions, attitudes or behaviours of an interlocutor or an audience by making a statement credible or acceptable" (Adam, Les textes : types et prototypes, Paris : Nathan, 1992:116). There are however different ways of reaching this goal as will be shown in a collection of varied internet videos on climate change. Ecological discourses may be of an expositive nature, i.e. rely on explanations of processes, but can also be closer to exhortation as environmentalists wish to urge people and governments to act on the issue of global warming. A difference in multimodal complexity and/or intensity is observed between the two genres, which are expressed through various multimodal constructs involving gesture, object handling and use of diverse visual resources, but also different verbal strategies and prosodic variations (in terms of intonation, stress, rhythm, etc).
Bio: Gaëlle Ferré is a professor of English language and linguistics at the University of Poitiers in France. She works mainly in Multimodal Discourse Analysis on audiovisual documents of various genres, with a focus on gesture, prosody and the semantic/syntax interface in Discourse Analysis. The focus of her research consists in showing how communication involves speakers to choose among the different semiotic modes at their disposal to convey linguistic content in the most efficient way, and how hearers attend to these semiotic modes. In oral communication, the semiotic modes available to convey messages are not limited to verbal content but also include prosodic variations and bodily behaviour and all of these together form gestalts that are both internally complex and compositional.
