Description
This paper develops genre analysis for websites. As such it fits conference topic 1: development of SFL Theory and Description.Website analysis has tended to focus on words in text (e.g. Cucchi 2019) or on multimodality (e.g. Swan 2017). Our analysis of ten British and Indonesian bioplastics websites focuses on genre analysis, recognising genres as multimodal semiotic entities, and thus allowing meaningful comparisons.
Research examining university home pages (Zhang 2017) and tourism websites (Kaltenbacher 2007) has noted the marketization of such discourse. Websites designed to inform (e.g., NHS websites) or teach (e.g., Duolingo) have different purposes to corporate websites. “The corporate web site, as a genre for communication, is unusual in that its visitors have diverse interests.” (Coupland 2005:356).
We present our manual analysis (cf Baldry & O’Halloran) of bioplastics websites, and the genres that emerge. Basically each website is viewed as a macrogenre, and each ‘part’ is viewed as a minigenre which is realised by multimodal resources (e.g. ‘About the company’ may be realised in text, whereas ‘the Founders’ may be realised in photos and text.) Parts may be grouped into superclusters (e.g. a header may include a page title, a logo, and a name). By searching for genres, between these macro and mini genres, we produce a functional analysis.
In this presentation we describe ten websites and identify what an Indonesian vs British corporate macro-genre looks like in terms of genres and mini-genres. It is clear from a formal analysis that the British websites tend to be twice as long as the Indonesian ones. A genre analysis requires more consideration of the purpose of each page or pagelet, and shows the functional similarities which explain the contrasts between the Indonesian and UK corporate websites. This analysis allows us to differentiate genres for analysis of sustainability communication.
References:
Baldry, A. and O'Halloran, K. 2010. Research into the Annotation of a Multimodal Corpus of University Websites: An Illustration of Multimodal Corpus Linguistics, in Harris, T. and Moreno Jaen, M. (ed), Corpus Linguistics in Language Teaching. Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 177-209.
Coupland, C. (2005). Corporate social responsibility as argument on the web. Journal of business ethics, 62, 355-366.
Cucchi, C. (2019). National cultures on European corporate homepages in English: a linguistic analysis. International Journal of Business Communication, 56(2), 198-232.
Kaltenbacher, M. (2007). Culture related linguistic differences in tourist websites: The emotive and the factual-A corpus analysis within the framework of appraisal. G. Thompson, & S. Hunston, System and corpus: Exploring connections. Oakville, Connecticut: Equinox.
Swan, E. (2017). Postfeminist stylistics, work femininities and coaching: A multimodal study of a website. Gender, Work & Organization, 24(3), 274-296.
Zhang, T. (2017). The Marketization of higher education discourse: A genre analysis of university website homepages in China. Higher Education Studies, 7(3), 64-79.
| Period | 7 Jul 2025 → 11 Jul 2025 |
|---|---|
| Event title | International Systemic Functional Congress and Institute : A Trinocular Retrospective |
| Event type | Conference |
| Conference number | 50 |
| Location | Glasgow, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |