El diseño de un corpus multimodal

Abstract

“The design of a multimodal corpus” is a brief attempt to look at new requirements in design and access for the corpus of the future in the disciplines of linguistics and discourse analysis. As Michael Halliday has stressed; the availability of large corpora for the first time represents a turning point in linguistic science; and corpus linguistics is quickly establishing itself as an important branch of linguistic inquiry with concepts such as “corpus-driven” language study. In this article we look at the requirements of a corpus integrating both verbal and non-verbal (pictorial; audio; cinematic) material; typical of messages in the modern world. Our approach to these requirements is through examples of analysis of a variety of multimodal texts from the press and advertising media. We conclude that future textual corpora should be depositories of meanings rather than linguistic forms; and we stress the importance of genre as an organizational criterion.