Book Review: Ruth Page, David Barton, Carmen Lee, Johann Wolfgang Unger, and Michele Zappavigna, Researching Language and Social Media: A Student Guide

Abstract

socio-semioticians in creating, witnessing, describing, labelling, supporting or opposing, and legitimating and negotiating semiotic practices (p. 264). In summary, this volume conducts a systemic analysis of the pandemic’s effects on communicative patterns, functions, strategies, technologies, meanings and purposes across political, economic and social dimensions, which are likely to be continued because of the possibility of the continuation of the pandemic. It provides readers with an opportunity to consider and prepare for issues involving multimodal communication that will likely arise in similar situations to come (p. 11). Despite these strengths, the volume has room for minor improvement. As far as research methods are concerned, this volume has confined itself to the case study of a country. It cannot be denied that this can be an important path for introducing how discourses, modes and media pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic affected daily lives of people in a certain country in terms of the various meanings they carry. However, adding a contrastive perspective by analysing discourses in different countries would have helped to reveal the similarities and differences of multimodal meaning building mechanisms in different regions, and the characteristics of the narrative mode and discourse strategy of the mainstream media of a country in reporting news about the coronavirus and the pandemic in other countries. Overall, this volume provides an enlightening and innovative perspective for multimodal discourse research. The research is based on a linguistic-theory-motivated and interdisciplinary model, which can not only guide the innovation of multimodal discourse research, but also promote the coordinated development of humanities and social sciences and other sciences. It is highly recommended for any reader interested in the field of multimodal discourse analysis or other fields whose work focuses on the use of multimodal discourse for communication and meaning making.