Multimodal crime news in Japan and the UK: a study of the interaction between news production and reception

Abstract

The interaction between news production and reception realised by written hard news texts is generally characterised as implicit. However, under the pressure of marketisation, news companies, by using multimodal resources and the internet, produce various types of semiotic effects to make their news texts more interactive and entertaining while maintaining the traditional informative and authorial stances. In this research, I will examine crime news texts as a discourse type and investigate how news companies in Japan and the UK establish an interpersonal relationship with their readers through news reports, juxtaposing images in page-based multimodal news provided online. My main aim is to discuss the interpersonal meanings realised in the data based on three analytical and methodological tools: Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), a semiotic approach to language proposed by Halliday and Matthiessen (2004), the visual grammar, an application of SFL to the visual mode, devised by Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) and corpus linguistics. This analysis shows that in the process of news production, facts are interpreted and recontextualised in order to maximise discoursal values. It also shows that the British and the Japanese press realize criminal meanings according to their contextual and cultural values and practices.