Child Marriage Through UNICEF Brochures: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Child Marriage is the most important critical issue which has lots of negative consequences on societies since it is associated with children's depression of their rights and the direct threatening of their future. The current paper tackles the analysis of one of UNICEF brochures on child marriage through a multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA). This paper aims to identify the linguistic devices presented in brochure selected and further, it hypothesizes that MCDA approach reveals a correlation between the texts and the images used in the brochure. An eclectic model is adopted including Fairclaugh’s (1992, 1995, 2001) Three–Dimensional Approach, and (Halliday M. A., 1985), (Halliday M. , 1994 and 2004), Systematic Functional Linguistics Approach (SFL) for the analysis of the verbal aspects ; in addition to Kress & Van Leeuwen's (1996,2006) approach is used for  Reading Images for the analysis of the non-verbal aspects. The study concluded that there is a great difference in implementing various theories as to end child marriage and this is due to various ideologies followed through many cultures.