Jan Chovanec

The dream of a perfect body come true: Multimodality in cosmetic surgery advertising

This article documents the operation of multimodal and rhetorical strategies in cosmetic surgery leaflets, with a focus on the interplay between the verbal and visual channels. It describes how advertising discourse exploits the image of an idealized female body in order to achieve its economic goals. Recipients are targeted through the application of the prevalent ideology of femininity, which in the Western context is increasingly dependent on patterns of consumption of body-oriented products and services against the background of (male) expectations of the female body ideal. It is argued that in this situation, which merges the private with the public and in which women willingly participate in the self-perpetuating ideology of male-defined femininity, women may, for various reasons, identify with the super-ideal sexualized images of women offered to them, while indulging in a mixture of fantasy and reality and sharing in the guilty knowledge that their own imperfect bodies need to be fixed. This article points out that such ideologies are very effectively studied through their multimodal realizations, where the visual mode, in particular, can non-verbally draw on and reproduce stereotyped representations.

Written academic discourse in English : from local traditions to global outreach

The text discusses the position of local academic traditions in the modern context of global academic discourse dominated by the Anglo-American rhetorical style that represents the standard for modern international academic communication. After reviewing some of the central notions attached to the discipline of genre analysis of written academic discourse, the paper argues for an extension of the traditional research agenda by calling for a broad sociolinguistics of genre. It is suggested that sociological, ethnographic, cross-cultural, translatological, pedagogical and critical approaches may enrich the current understanding of written academic genres. They can do so by revealing some of the ideologies and implicit norms on which particular disciplines rely in the discursive production and reproduction of knowledge, as well as the textual practices present in the transformation, recontextualization, translation, editing, etc., that may affect the eventual form of the academic texts produced, in particular, by non-native scholars coming from other cultural and academic backgrounds than the dominant global English-language model.

Pragmatics of tense and time in news : from canonical headlines to online news texts

This book provides the first comprehensive account of temporal deixis in English printed and online news texts. Linking the characteristic usage of tenses with the projection of deictic centres, it notes how conventional tenses, particularly in headlines, are affected by heteroglossia arising from various accessed voices. The resulting tense shifts are interpreted pragmatically as a conventional reader-oriented strategy that creates the impression of temporal co-presence. It is argued that since different tense choices systematically correlate with the three main textual segments of news texts, the function of tense needs to be viewed in a close connection with its local context. Traditional news texts are also contrasted with online news, particularly as far as the effect of hypertextuality on the coding of time is concerned. A two-level structural framework for the analysis of online news is proposed in order to account for their increased textual complexity. The book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students working in the fields of media pragmatics, discourse analysis and stylistics.