"Are you really voting for your favourites? Multimodal Genres and Ideology in Talent Shows

This chapter presents an analysis of the multimodal discursive strategies employed in the creation of talent shows which have international editions and involve several contemporary “performance” spaces (TV, web, social networks) revealing a multifarious macro show genre which is not tied to a single media or web environment. A combined Systemic Functional Linguistics and multimodal corpus-assisted approach (Halliday, 1978, 1994; Baldry & Thibault, 2006; Kress, 2018) is used first to investigate the multimodal strategies employed in the 2018 season of the X Factor (UK) and, then, to analyse some of the language used by the official judges of the show. Considering talent shows in the framework of a more general discourse on evaluation, the paper explores how the construction of consensus and evaluation is built up via the use of the judges’ language.