ABSTRACT
In recent years, the role of language in disaster warnings to convey a sense of urgency has gained attention among disaster researchers and practitioners in Japan. Taking a multimodal discourse analysis approach, the present study examines the interplay of language and other meaning-making resources in constructing a tsunami warning produced by a Japanese public broadcasting media. With careful attention to the sequence of the discourse as well as the context and the social actors involved in the production of disaster warnings, this study demonstrates the moment-by-moment framing of urgency and other contextually relevant features through verbal and visual texts. Based on findings from the qualitative analysis of the tsunami warning, this paper argues that the mixed use of honorific request forms in the spoken text and the visual saliency of the imperative forms in the open captioning (i.e. telop) foreground the urgency and official nature of the broadcasting discourse. Findings of this study offer new insights into the critical discussion of disaster warning designs that penetrate normal activities and initiate protective actions among the warning recipients within a limited time and space.
