The representation of experience in undergraduate business students’ texts: A functional analysis of multimodal meaning making resources in marketing texts

Abstract

From the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) standpoint, experiential meanings reflect our experience, perceptions, and consciousness. Research on experiential meaning-making in tertiary contexts has traditionally focused on areas such as mathematics, journalism and media, science and computing, nursing, and history. This paper aims to investigate the experiential multimodal meanings in an undergraduate marketing course. The data comprised three written assignments and the tutor’s two model texts. The study employed a multidimensional approach by Alyousef (2013), which is framed by SFL (Halliday 2014) and O’Halloran’s (2005, 1998, 2008, 1999) multisemiotic framework for the analysis of semiotic codes in mathematics. The results showed that the experiential meanings in the students’ marketing plan texts were primarily construed through material processes and both explicit and implicit relational identifying processes. The findings indicated how mathematical symbolism is encoded in the multisemiotic texts, in the most economical manner, by using grammatical strategies of structural condensation. The results also noted the extent to which the different modes of meaning were integrated in the texts.