Principles for the Analysis of Style

Abstract

This paper argues that style uses the concrete, physical qualities of multimodal artefacts and performances to realize the values that make up individual or corporate identities. It presents a methodological framework for analyzing these qualities, based on the principles of experiential meaning potential, provenance and contextualization. It then introduces the concepts of harmony and perspective as principles for understanding how the qualities of parameters such as shape, color and texture work together in creating the styles of multimodal texts. It concludes by exemplifying, step by step, how a multimodal analysis of style may be conducted.