The genre of university website presentations: Constructing a picture through voices

The paper attracts attention to institutional websites, particularly the websites of selected British, North American and Czech universities, and their generic status and characteristics. Drawing upon a multi-faceted analysis of the corpus anchored in Hallidayan Systemic Functional approach, the related, recently developed fields of genre analysis and multimodal discourse analysis, and the Bakhtin's concept of polyphony in the text, the study focuses on the multimodal complexity of the generic structure of the websites, which gives rise to their heteroglossic nature. Whereas the verbal components of the home page and prospective students' web pages are largely monoglossic, heteroglossia and polyphony are brought into play through the distinctive affordances of non-verbal modes and their mutual interplay. In addition to this, the many-voicedness of the genre is supported by the use of embedded genres such as blogs, vlogs and interviews. The images as well as the layout build a picture of the university, construct its identity and its relationship with the receivers, and organise the structure of the website either in parallel or in a complementary relation with the verbal mode.