genre analysis; web genres; institutional websites; multimodality; blog

The paper focuses on institutional websites, particularly the websites of selected British, North American and Czech universities, exploring their generic status and characteristics. The website is viewed as a discourse colony consisting of independent but related components realized in an array of subgenres, some of which are typical of academic/institutional environment while others come from different discourse domains and are employed as embedded genres. The presentation focuses on the blog as an embedded genre, its forms and functions within university websites, and particularly on its potentially multimodal character, i.e. the interplay of the verbal content of the blog as a whole as well as of individual posts and the non-verbal elements, esp. photographs, which co-create the producer?s message sent to the addressee. Drawing upon the recently developed field of multimodal discourse analysis within Hallidayan Systemic Fuctional Linguistics, the paper explores the level to which the modes are integrated and the ways they contribute to the meaning-making in the genre.