Leonzini, Luisella (2013) Reading through the language of The Economist: an approach to analyse intersemiotic complementarity in multimodal discourse. in ADVANCES IN BUSINESS RELATED SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH JOURNAL (ABSRJ), voulme 4, 2,pp. 177-202. ISBN 1855-931X

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to examine how the visual and the verbal modes co-occur in text-based multimodal discourse. M. A. K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics Theory (1978, 1985, 1994) and Kress and Van Leeuwen’s socio-semiotic approach to develop a grammar of visual communication (1996/2006) provide the theoretical and descriptive framework which I will apply to the analysis of a multimodal text from the Leaders section of The Economist magazine. It will be my main concern to investigate how the visual mode is used by the British magazine as a tool to introduce and comment on the verbal counterpart, which, by developing and elucidating what the image suggested, nurtures intersemiotic complementarity in discourse. JEL Classification: M10, Z00, M00