A theoretical framework for multimodal discourse analysis presented via the analysis of identity construction of two women living in Germany

This dissertation establishes a theoretical framework for multimodal discourse analysis, applying the theoretical notions to the question of identity construction of two women living in Germany.;The multimodal framework allows the incorporation of concurrent actions and the setting, which traditionally have been called context, into a discourse study by analyzing numerous communicative modes including spoken language, gaze, gesture, music, and print. The framework consists of the concept of a foreground-background continuum and the notion of modal density. These two theoretical notions give insight into the level of attention/awareness that a social actor invests in simultaneously performed actions.;Social actors demonstrate their shift in focus from one higher-level action to another through a signaling system, or the higher-level discourse structure. The higher-level discourse structure consists of lower-level actions, which I call means, and is mainly made up of beat gestures and deictics.;The establishment of this theoretical framework is based on a ten-month longitudinal ethnographic study of the two participants. An application of the foreground-background continuum shows that the participants simultaneously construct several identities, which I call horizontal identity construction. The notion of modal density demonstrates that a social actor may also construct several vertical levels of identity, which is the compounding of identity across a hierarchy of levels of action.