TENOR AS A MULTIMODAL REGISTER CHARACTERISTIC OF THE INSTAGRAM PROFILE (a compared analysis of Queen Rania’s official website and Instagram profile in Arabic and English)

Abstract

Instagram is currently the object of linguistic research in various fields. For linguistic socio-semiotic research, Instagram is valuable, particularly for its multimodality. The methodological basis of the article is the theory of register, which is a tool of social semiotics. The article specifically examines Instagram as a subject of linguistic socio-semantic research and proposes a general methodology for analyzing the interpersonal function, using Queen Rania’s official Instagram profile as a case study. It explores this profile as a multimodal virtual situational context of communication, comparing it to official websites. As a virtual social context, Instagram provides its users with access to the implementation of three meta-functions: interpersonal, ideational and textual. The purpose of the article is to identify the relevant multimodal parameters of tenor of Instagram profiles and to compare them with websites in Arabic and English. Additionally, the article aims to describe the case characteristics of tenor of the official profile of Queen Rania of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan within the context of social semiotics. To describe tenor of the Instagram profile in comparison with the official websites in Arabic and English of Queen Rania, the following social parameters were stratified: social status, social role, and situational social role. The study has accomplished the following tasks: a review of current socio-semiotic research, which examines the functions of the language system in the context of their emergence; a consideration of M. Halliday’s provisions, which describe variations in language use as a combination of semantic resources influenced by contextual variations; and the practical multidisciplinary application of the theory of register. Additionally, the concept of “multimodal discourse” of Instagram as an object of linguistic socio-semiotic research is examined, and a general methodology for describing the interpersonal function of an Instagram profile as a multimodal virtual situational context of communication is proposed. The article employs various general scientific and linguistic research methods: a deductive method to identify tenor register characteristics as an expression of the interpersonal metafunction of an Instagram profile; a descriptive method, which includes external interpretation (to assess the influence of Instagram’s situational context on the interpersonal function) and internal interpretation. The method of semiotic decoding of visual information [Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001] was applied for interpretation, and the comparative method was used to analyze the multimodal characteristics of websites in relation to Queen Rania’s Instagram profile. A qualitative method was used to describe the multimodal characteristics of websites in Arabic and English and Queen Rania’s Instagram profile. Additionally, a comparative method was employed to compare the multimodal characteristics of tenor of websites and Instagram profiles. Using the example of Queen Rania’s official profile, the possibility of highlighting the following multimodal parameters of tenor in the situational context of Instagram was demonstrated: visual semiotic (photo); multicultural language of social statuses; popularity; silence (absence of responses to comments); ability to assess a person of royal social status. Instagram is presented as a virtual semiotic space of emotionally significant signs, represented through verbal (text, hashtags), visual (photos), and video channels (short videos, reels). Socio-semantic analysis reveals that tenor, as the interpersonal function of an Instagram profile, is shaped by multimodal semiotic components, each contributing to varying degrees of interpersonal interaction within the communicative space. It has been proven that the components of the interpersonal function, as a register characteristic of tenor of an Instagram profile, include social stratification data and social activity as a variable component. As a register characteristic, tenor is dynamic and influenced by temporal, cultural, and situational contexts — the extralinguistic context in which Instagram’s multimodal meanings are created. The applied socio- semantic analysis of multimodal signs on Queen Rania’s profile revealed a correlation between the interpersonal and ideational functions. The most popular (tenor) hyper-themes (field), include ‘personal life, family, holidays, and children’ which are expressed through bright, emotional photos as multimodal resources. The color of the visual content serves both expressive and social functions, influencing the level of social interaction. The interpersonal, ideational, and textual functions of Instagram as a virtual situational context, with its registers as a configuration of semantic resources, are embodied by multimodal means, demonstrating the multimodality of Instagram registers as a combination of signs from different semiotic systems.

Keywords

• instagram
• social semiotics
• register
• multimodal discourse
• interpersonal meta function
• tenor