Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in subsequent chapters of this book. The book studies the structure of documents from a multimodal perspective examining how documents combine text, images, and other forms of communication. The field of linguistics has a long tradition of systematically studying the structure and functions of natural language, which is arguably the most complex mode of communication currently in use. The book explores the multimodal artefact that is conceptualised as a middle ground, a site of integration for the contributions arising from both mode and genre. The Genre and Multimodality (Gem) model is a framework for the detailed description of multimodal artefacts that incorporates an XML-based annotation schema for creating multimodal corpora. The book concludes the implications of the multimodal analyses, converts the analyses into pragmatic advice for the tourism industry, and proposes several avenues of further research.