The Image as a Text: Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Selected Political Campaign Posters of Algerian Presidential Elections 2019

Abstract

Multimodal discourse analysis mainly focuses on the study of language in use with other modalities like images, music, and graphs. After the publication of the book 'Reading images, the grammar of visual design’ by Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996, 2006), multimodal discourse analysis has become a study subject for researchers to investigate for the linguistic (verbal) and non- linguistic (visual) semiotic resources. The purpose of this study is to analyze the Algerian electoral posters during the national campaign, on December 12th, 2019. The study focuses on eight posters of the four candidates of the elections with exploring the techniques that are used for presenting the candidate appropriately. This study depends on leaders of parties in the elections, one candidate is chosen as independent (Abdelmadjid Taboun), another from National Forefronts of Liberty (NLF) led by Ali Benflis. The third one is Izzedine Mihoubi from Democratic National Rally. The fourth is from the National Building Movements party Abdelkader Bengrina and the last one is the leader of the face front Abdelaziz Belaid. This study also pinpoints the similarities and differences between each leader. More specifically, the present study examines the main linguistic and visual strategies used to convince the citizens to vote for that party. Besides, one significant instrument implemented for the analysis of the images is Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996, 2006) work, which clarify the understanding of how participants are represented in posters. The results obtained show that the electoral posters appeal and persuade the voters depending on the constituent elements of pictures.