Formal and Multimodal Approach to Hard News as Genre, Structure and Metalanguage in Social and Digital Media Contexts. The Example of Twitter

ABSTRACT

The goal of this paper is to improve heuristics for hard news discourse by proposing a cognitive model of abstraction, regarding social media contexts. To this end, hard news is discussed as a genre, structure and metalanguage, under the formal definition of a semiotic mode. Annotation is a successful technology to control the effects of genre operations, reveal relations, and to inquire about data and documents. It proceeds to characterize Twitter’s interface, in terms of formal and material regularities, employed recursively. It further demonstrates the formalization of a semantics for hard news discourse in the so-called logical forms, which has been adapted from analytical tools developed by the Segmented Theory of Discourse Representation (SDRT) in order to examine coherence in different levels of detail. Finally, the implication of this approach as a discipline is discussed, regarding the production of transversal knowledge aiming at digital literacy, which urges in present times.¹

KEYWORDS:
Multimodal discourse semantics; SDRT; Annotation; Digital methods; Hard news