See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/300449188 An interpersonal study of The Leading Hotels of the World. A systemic- functional social-semiotic approach Chapter · January 2014 DOI: 10.1075/sfsl.68.04moy CITATIONS READS 0 107 2 authors, including: Arsenio Jesús Moya Guijarro Spanish National Research Council 32 PUBLICATIONS 281 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Multimodality in children's picture books View project AMULIT View project All content following this page was uploaded by Arsenio Jesús Moya Guijarro on 05 April 2017. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. John Benjamins Publishing Company This is a contribution from Theory and Practice in Functional-Cognitive Space. Edited by María de los Ángeles Gómez González, Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Francisco Gonzálvez-García. © 2014. 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Please contact [email protected] or consult our website: www.benjamins.com Tables of Contents, abstracts and guidelines are available at www.benjamins.com An interpersonal study of the leading hotels of the world A systemic-functional social-semiotic approach Arsenio Jesús Moya Guijarro and José María González Lanza University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain Within the frameworks of Halliday’s SFL and Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Visual Social Semiotics, the main aim of this chapter is to analyse how the verbal and visual modes of ten tourist brochures, taken from The Leading Hotels of the World guide (2009), are co-deployed to construct interpersonal meaning. The use of declarative mood structures, the scarce presence of imperative clauses and the lack of interrogative clauses demonstrate that the verbal component accompanying the photographs does not encourage much interaction. However, the middle-shots and essentially the medium angles utilised are evidence of the engagement created between the visual readers and what is displayed in the photographs. This analysis shows that words and images reinforce each other to highlight the elitist characteristics of the facilities and services offered to the potential clients. Keywords: interpersonal, multimodality, tourist brochures, social semiotics 1. Introduction Since Vestegaard and Schrøder (1985) analysed printed advertisement taken from seven magazines circulating in Great Britain in 1977, the advertising phenomenon has attracted the attention of linguists such as Coleman (1990), Bell (1991) Cook (1992), Myers (1994), Goddard (1998) and Crook (2004), among others. Most of the studies carried out up until the last decade of the 20th century focus essen- tially on ads taken from the radio, magazines and newspapers. In the past, when radio was the main media to advertise products, advertisements mainly consisted of words and music; there were no images used. However, with the arrival of the medium of television in the 1950s and 1960s and the development of the internet © 2014. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved 86 Arsenio Jesús Moya Guijarro and José María González Lanza in the 20th century, the ways of selling things changed, and pictures and mov- ing images started to play a key role in advertising campaigns (Budd et al., 1999, p. 9; Tan, 2009, pp. 157–158; Crystal, 2011). This change has contributed to the development of multimodal studies, through which not only the verbal mode, but also other modes which are beyond language itself, are analysed. Whether static or dynamic, printed on paper or taken from TV or the Internet, adverts are composite wholes and usually include different semiotic resources in their designs as semiotic products or events created within a specific social and cultural context (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001, p. 20, 2006; Kress, 2010). Studies on multimodality investigate possible strategies available to visual art- ists and writers to create meaning in a given discourse both within and across modes, and, in turn, analyse the choices that have actually been made in the design of a specific multimodal text (Forceville, 2010; Moya, 2013). This paper aims to identify the verbal and visual strategies used by hotel advertisers to persuade the readers/viewers of the hotel book The Leading Hotels of The World (2009) to pur- chase a product – in this case a hotel reservation – and to delve into the ideologies underlying the company. Within the frameworks of Halliday’s SFG (2004) and Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Visual Social Semiotics (2006), we will attempt to anal- yse how the verbal and visual modes are co-deployed to construct interpersonal meaning in the ten London hotels included in the guide. The Leading Hotels of the World (2009) guide is presented to the reader/ viewer as a book of quests with a map which will guide them in their research of remarkable journeys, unmatched service and exclusivity. On the second and third pages of the book, the names of the executive committee members are introduced together with a letter from the president and chief executive officer of the com- pany The Leading Hotels of the World Ltd. Theodore Teng, as president of the firm, introduces himself to the reader, presenting the list of the most luxurious hotels in the world which the guide contains. In his message he puts special emphasis on the exclusive services that the presented hotels offer to the client, bringing him or her closer each moment to a world of distinction, exquisite treatment and luxury. The study conducted here centres on Europe and within Europe, on the United Kingdom, specifically on London and the ten five-star hotels recommended by the company: Badlioni London, Brown’s Hotel, The Cadogan Hotel, Dukes, The Halkin, The Landmark London, The Langham, The Milestone Hotel, One Aldwych and The Ritz London (included between pages 289 and 298 of the hotel book). The paper also aims to investigate the extent to which the ideologies of luxury and exclusivity (Thurslow and Jaworski 2006) underlying the marketing philoso- phy of the company The Leading Hotels of the World may influence the semiotic choices actually made by marketers at interpersonal/interactive levels to promote the hotel destinations (Hopearuoho & Ventola, 2009). As the hotels included in © 2014. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved An interpersonal study of the leading hotels of the world 87 The Leading Hotels of the World book were initially intended for people belong- ing to high class society, the interpersonal appeal is probably achieved through the creation of an illusion of exclusiveness and social status (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2006). The way society interprets adverts is strongly influenced by the culture and the social ideology within which they are designed and created (Kress, 2010). After specifying the aims and scope of this study, in Section 2 we outline the key features of SFG (Halliday, 2004) and Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Visual Social Semiotics (2006) that may help to describe the meaning-making affordances of both images and words as independent and interdependent modes in our sample texts. Once the data is presented and the methodology is described, Section 3, the main body of the paper, deals with the analysis of the verbal and non-verbal meaning-making devices available to the writer and the photographer of the guide to promote their luxurious hotels. Finally, the results are interpreted in functional terms and, on the basis of the analysis, some generalisations concerning the semi- otic organisation and general design of the ten hotel brochures are made. 2. SFG and Visual Social Semiotics A systemic-functional social semiotic approach, essentially born of the combina- tion of Halliday’s SFL (1978, 2004) and Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Visual Social Semiotics (2006), is adopted here to carry out the proposed analysis. The bro- chures selected for study are examined from the perspective of Halliday’s sys- temic functional theory, as this approach is useful to explore what is advertised to whom and with what means, at the linguistic level of analysis. In addition, Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2006) Visual Social Semiotics, extrapolated from the SFG account, provides an appropriate framework to interpret multimodal texts and aims to describe the meaning-making resources of visual language. In this theo- retical framework multimodal artifacts are conceptualised as choices from semi- otic resources which are beyond language itself and are combined and integrated across verbal, visual, auditory and somatic modes to create meaning in context.1 1. The concepts of choice and system are central in Systemic Functional Linguistics and have played a key role in the development of this theory from its initial stages (Halliday, 1978). Systemic functional linguists describe language as a system of choices, i.e. a set of options avail- able to the user of the language to express meaning, and which can be selected from on a par- ticular occasion. In turn, choice is seen as a social semiotic act which needs to be interpreted both socially and semiotically (Fontaine, 2013, p. 5). Today, with the advent of new technologies, both verbal and non-verbal modalities are used to make and exchange meaning, thus extending the semiotic choices available to convey representational, interactive and textual meanings in a specific social and cultural context.