Interdiscursivity, hypertextuality, multimodality: A corpus-based multimodal move analysis of Internet group buying deals

Internet group buying has gained unprecedented popularity worldwide in a handful of years, yet little scholarly work has been done on this increasingly important sales and marketing channel. Specifically, no discourse-related studies thus far have examined the generic characteristics of Internet group buying deals. Through the examination of the 100 most popular Internet group buying deals from the top 10 group buying websites targeting mainly the market in Hong Kong, the present study investigates the rhetorical structure of Internet group buying deals by means of a corpus-based multimodal move analysis. This novel approach integrating corpus techniques and multimodal dimensions into the study of move structure identifies 13 move types in the genre and reveals how Internet group buying deals are rhetorically organized through the interplay between the mixing of interdiscursive elements, the use of hypertextual links and the selection of multimodal resources. The dynamic interactions revealed by the present study not only further our understanding of a previously unexamined yet discursively complex genre, but also contribute to theory and methodology development in genre analysis in the digital age.

► This paper studies the 100 most popular Internet group buying deals from Hong Kong.
► The first in-depth study of a previously unexamined yet discursively complex genre.
► The corpus-based multimodal move analysis identifies 13 move types in this genre.
► Interdiscursivity, hypertextuality and multimodality interact across the move types.
► The genre is a product of five discourse types with different discursive patterns.