Synergy of Modes for Enhancing Persuasion in Arab Socio-Religious TV Shows: A Multimodal Argumentation Analysis of Wa Mahyay

Abstract

Multimodal argumentation has become one of the recent trends in interdisciplinary research. It has been applied to the commonly persuasive genres, such as advertisements and cartoons; however, a scarcity of research has been conducted on TV shows, and none was pursued to analyze didactic TV shows that probably appeared after the outbreak of the Arab Spring with the aim of approaching the public audience from social and religious perspectives and motivating them to open a new page in a new chapter of self-and social- improvements. Therefore, this study applied a qualitative multimodal argumentation analysis to two randomly selected episodes from a Saudi didactic TV show to investigate the interplay of the various meaning-making resources utilized as rhetorical features to persuade the audience. The theoretical frameworks used encompass van Eemeren et al.'s (2002) pragma-dialectics and Baldry and Thibault's (2006) multimodal transcription developed from Kress and van Leeuwen's (2006) multimodal discourse analysis. The findings of the study showed a necessarily complementary relation between the verbal and visual modes of communication to enhance their persuasive effect on the audience. This interdisciplinary research provides valuable insights into the areas of semiotics, pragmatics, and media studies that can help linguists, media scholars and producers of this genre of TV shows.