Phase and transition, type and instance: patterns in media texts as seen through a multimodal concordancer

This paper explores the notion of types of phase and subphase in a corpus of car advertisements and asks the following questions: What is a multimodal transcription and what is a multimodal concordancer? What is the relation between them and how can they promote English studies, both from the standpoint of the researcher carrying out detailed comparisons of texts and, more generally, from the standpoint of teachers and students of English? Why should we be looking at type as opposed to instance? In answer to these questions, the paper illustrates how a characterization of phase-and-transition types leads to a better understanding of the features of dynamic genres of which TV ads are just one exponent, one that at the very least provides a guiding framework for students taking their first steps in the analysis of dynamic texts. While multimodal transcription can be a useful starting point for an understanding of the ways in which resources such as gaze, gesture and language combine in typical phasal patterns, it has its limitations, whence the use of the MCA multimodal concordancer to search a car advert corpus for patterns in descriptions previously created by the researcher using MCA's annotational tool. The annotational patterns so far used in the construction of a corpus of car adverts relate mainly to the metafunctional and phasal organization of the texts. This shows that a car advert can be defined in terms of the relationship between the car driver and the car itself, with car-drive (CD) phases intertwining with car-stationary (CS) phases. MCA is thus the result of efforts to create transcription and annotational tools that meet functional criteria in a way that was not achieved by the first generations of lemma-based concordancers. This work reflects the corpus linguistics research community's changed needs in recent years that now privilege specialized corpora, including the analysis, whether comparative or otherwise, of specific collections of texts.