Rhetoric relations and multimodality in the Monetary Policy Report genre of academic discourse of the Economy

Abstract

This study seeks to identify and to quantify the intersemiotic relations between the artifact Graphic and its verbal context in the Monetary Policy Report (MPR) of the Central Bank of Chile in a sample of 14 texts. At the same time, it describes the historic evolution of the intersemiotic relations that emerge in the corpus sample. This is an interesting genre to study because it has been found ecologically as part of the syllabi of Economic in two Chilean universities. This genre is defined by the teachers as an essential genre for the disciplinary insertion in Economy due to its ‘imported’ profile, in other words, the report is generated in a professional context, but it was found in an academic context. From this scenario, this article provides, from a multimodal perspective, an intersemiotic genre analysis based on the Rhetoric Structural Theory. Regarding the results, the findings may be summarized in three directions. First, the Content relation with the highest frequency is the Elaboration (63%). Second, in the presentational relations the most relevant is the Background (61%). Third, the directionality in the relation between the artifact Graphic and the verbal system corresponds to the kind Nucleus-Satellite (79%). The empirical findings indicate that the construction of meanings from intersemiotic relations in the MPR genre is produced by taking the Graphic as a central axis of the meaning making process and the verbal system works as a satellite, providing information of the nucleus that the writer considers relevant to guide the reader.

Keywords: rhetoric relations, multimodality, MPR genre, graphic, RST.