German travel vlogs as a multimodal text type: A study on strategies of situation intertwining
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Abstract
Written based travel diaries and travel blogs are the sources of currently emerging travel vlogs. Technological features in vlogs, however, allow spoken languages, gestures, and moving images to be presented. Therefore, travel vlogs have become a multimodal text type with special strategies of spoken language integrating with gestures and moving images. The aim of this study is to investigate gesture strategies with situation intertwining function, focusing on gestures that occur in conjunction with spoken language and moving images. The analyzed data were collected from 12 freely accessible German travel vlogs published on different YouTube channels in 2019, ranging from 10-25 minutes in length, with travel destinations outside Europe and a main speaker as vlogger.
The result suggests that shifting the camera toward a referent is considered the most frequent gesture used in the selected travel vlogs. The camera shifts were used to show locations, situations, and objects in the environment, as well as to draw the viewer's attention to the intended referent. The camera shifts are often presented with the following verbal elements: Verb conjugations with temporal use, personal deixis, spatial deixis, temporal deixis, and deictic expressions referring to an object or event. The relationship between the camera shifts and these verbal elements can be interpreted as images authenticating the veracity of the spoken word (mit Bildern authentisieren) and images anchoring the spoken word with the respective speaker (mit Bildern autorisieren). Furthermore, the use of the deictic expressions in relation to an object or event that appears with the camera shifts toward a referent can be interpreted as images providing more details to the spoken word (mit Bildern semantisieren). In addition, spatial deixis used with the camera shifts can be analyzed in the way that the spoken word acts as an explicit reference, directing the audiences to the intended visible objects in the images (mit Worten sehen).
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