Termien selittäminen multimodaalisena toimintana yleistajuisissa tietokirjoissa

The article studies how visual images and their use in explaining field-specific terms can be analyzed with the concept of discourse patterns. When expounding and demonstrating the meaning of specialized terminology in popular non-fiction, different kinds of pictures are utilized to scaffold the reader-in-the-text’s understanding of the meanings of such field-specific terms. In the article, explanation sequences are analyzed as multimodal discourse patterns, where verbal text and images together produce knowledge-constructing interaction. Diverse resources of presenting information (e.g. genre features of written text, coding orientations of visual image) construct the interactive functions of a multimodal text. For example, a technologically oriented image can realize both functions in the introduction–description pattern whereas an image depicting a particular situation can function as an exemplification in the introduction–exemplification pattern. The analysis of discourse patterns aims to examine the ways of representing conceptual knowledge in research popularizations.