ABSTRACT
This introduction presents the key concepts covered in subsequent chapters in this book. Multimodality is an approach used to understand the contribution of various semiotic resources in studies of communication. The rapid development of digital interactive media, involving most social practices and communication media, has also had a clear impact on multimodal research. Halliday takes a social semiotic view of communication and distinguishes three metafunctions in human language: ideational, interpersonal and textual. The multimodal research, by analyzing the discourse of academic settings, focuses specifically on the discourse found in contexts of higher education. Intersemiotic relationships are varied and different modes may even contradict each other during communication. Regarding academic research settings, many studies that have developed multimodal discourse analysis for conference genres take a particular genre as a basis for the study and one or several multimodal instances as the object of the analysis.
