INTERSEMIOTIC COMPLEMENTARITY BETWEEN CHYRONS AND THE SPOKEN DISCOURSE: A CROSS-REGIONAL ANALYSIS OF YOUTUBE NEWS COVERAGE OF THE US-IRAN PEACE TALKS

Abstract

  News media in the form of television news is now using intersemiosis in communicating complex events happening internationally; however, not much work has been done in the area of televised chyrons and spoken discourse from the point of view of intersemiosis. The present paper examines the ideational intersemiotic complementarity between televised chyrons and spoken discourse in international YouTube news of the peace talks of USA and Iran which took place in Pakistan. Based on the theoretical model of Ideational Intersemiotic Complementarity proposed by Royce (2007), a qualitative Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) was used to analyze how participants, processes, and circumstances are semantically related in terms of repetition, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, meronymy, and collocation. The data consists of six purposefully chosen YouTube news clips from BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, India Today, and Dawn channels, wherein the first four minutes of each report have been analyzed. The results suggest that repetition is the most common semantic relation, followed by synonymy. Even though all the news stations used the same intersemiotic devices in order to ensure semantic coherence, cross-regional variations were found in their coverage of the peace negotiations: The Western stations were more concerned with geopolitical diplomacy, while the South Asian news stations focused more on Pakistan’s mediation, and the Middle Eastern news stations concentrated more on regional security and ceasefires. The application of Royce’s model to international YouTube news discourse adds to the field of multimodal discourse analysis and reveals the use of visual-verbal semiotic means in representing current geopolitics.