The use of appropriate and accurate language is of utmost importance when describing people on the move and their dilemma, particularly refugees and displaced persons who have unique legal protection. So, there are a lot of scholars who have investigated the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR) reports, but no one has examined representational and interactional meanings of UNHCR reports. Accordingly, this research aims to explore the role of UNHCR reports in enhancing the value of the humanitarian, which is attributed to the uniqueness of its use of language. The current study investigates the manner in which the textual content interacts with the images that are associated with the category of the UNHCR reports. Four reports are analysed with regard to their representational, interactional structures of photos and transitivity analysis of texts. The present study adapts Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) and Transitivity System proposed by Halliday (2004). It is found that the participant roles of Actors and Goals of both photos and texts are more frequent than the other roles of participants. These roles are connected with the most dominant processes, the transactional action process of images and the material process of texts.
University of Baghdad
Digital Repository