ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview and discussion of qualitative and quantitative approaches to multimodal discourse analysis. Among many areas where multimodal research is being conducted, the field of semiotics is notable for its major contributions to the study of multimodality. Although mainly focused on written discourse rather than spoken, scholarly works in semiotics have established a theory of multimodality and multimodal communication that can be applied to the analysis of various multimodal discourses. Drawing on ethnographic data and video recordings of two German women, S. Norris proposes and illustrates a new theoretical and methodological framework of multimodal action analysis, and shows how it can be used to investigate identity. Much of the multimodal research in conversation analysis draws on data from institutional settings so as to explore routinised practices in various workplace settings. A gesture study is a vast field that encompasses a diversity of research domains across different disciplines whose analysis of spoken discourse focuses on speech and gesture.
