institutional discourse, university website, discourse colony, genre set, blog, genreembedding, multimodality, text-image interplay

The paper focuses on the institutional website as a complex genre with a relativelydiscontinuous inner structure, which is, however, coherent and cohesive, and unified by acommon communication goal(s). The website is viewed as a discourse colony consisting ofindependent but related components realized in an array of subgenres, some of which aretypical of the academic/institutional environment while others come from different discoursedomains and are employed as embedded genres. The paper focuses on the blog as anembedded genre, its forms and functions within university websites, and particularly on itspotentially multimodal character, i.e. the interplay of the verbal content of the blog and thenon-verbal elements, esp. photographs, which co-create the producer?s message to theaddressee. Drawing upon the recently developed field of multimodal discourse analysis withinHallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics, particularly Martinec and Salway?s model, the paperexplores the level to which the modes are integrated and the ways they contribute to meaningmakingin the genre.