Multimodal text type message in the Telegram messenger (based on the channel of the German party AfD)

Abstract

Multimodality is a central property of modern communication spaces, presented in the form of websites, web channels, and messengers, where the user encounters written and spoken speech, sound, and image in their combination. By decoding information in a multimedia message, the user encounters elements of different modalities, coming through different forms of perception: iconic (textual), auditory and visual. The steps in decoding the elements of the modalities are reading the text typed in a large header, visualizing the pictures, recognizing the text format and font, and reading the content of the message. Elements of modalities, except sound, can be arranged in the communication space in a certain order to ensure the visibility of the message and increase the information content of the messages, e. g.: the image in a cohesive combination with text, using different types of typographic fonts, colors and symbols. Multimodality is the media backbone of the German channel of political party AfD, with more than 19,000 subscribers in the messenger Telegram. The corpus of examples is compiled from 310 messages between January and December 2021. Messages in Telegram are a multimodal text type. Most of the messages are direct critical against the policies pursued by the German parties in the government. The article considers the peculiarities of the use of lexical means (emotive vocabulary, metaphors, lexicon, slogan, formality) and pragma-stylistic means (exclamatives, rhetorical questions) in combination with the image in multimodal messages in the German-language channel of the political party AfD — Im Brennpunkt