Wide spread of the Internet has opened up an unmatched environment for communication, which has become an overpopulated set of more or less clear forms, more or less accepted genres. The genre is considered as a social, cultural entity that reflects both historical development and modern needs of society (Bateman, 2008; Bax, 2011; Bhatia, 2004), as well as part of a dynamic shared repertoire that is constantly developing (Santini, Mehler & Sharoff, 2010), especially today within the latest technologies. A synchronic shared repertoire always spans the gap between traditional and established genres on the one hand and new genres on the other, between emerging genres that are gaining ground in certain areas of discourse and genres that are on the way to extinction. University websites are regarded as a specific genre of institutional discourse.

Being heterogeneous in nature, the university website genre is a hybrid genre, formed by both key mechanisms of hybridization: genre mixing and genre incorporation (Bhatia, 2004). The university website discourse consists of the interweaving and interaction within its framework of various types of discourse, which are refracted through the prism of the university website hypertext, acquiring new properties. Since elements of educational, scientific and advertising discourses are introduced into the discourse of university websites as marketing communication tools, both at the level of their content and their form (Caglar, Mentes, 2012). Thus, the unifying communicative objective of the hybrid genre of university websites is achieved through three main characteristics: hypertextuality, interactivity and multimodality, which are the result of the interaction of verbal and non-verbal elements.

There are works that shed light on the study of university websites, in particular: their web design and the relationship between visual resources and written texts and messages presented on websites (e.g., Baldry & O’Halloran, 2019); analysis of websites as cultural expression (e.g., Bernardini, Ferraresi & Gaspari, 2010). University websites are viewed as multimodal texts that construct discursive representations of educational practices in a specific geographic and sociocultural environment of the modern world. In turn, Thelwall (2005) has studied and compared the text features of university websites. Some authors (e.g., Nasti, Venuti & Zollo, 2017) have provided insights into how universities use multimodal elements to advertise their academic and research expertise, thus attracting prospective students. Various images contribute to the ideological, interpersonal and textual meanings that websites convey to future students [.

The spectrum of multimodal resources that are found in the modern communicative space of the websites of the U. S. universities under study is united by common features into a single composition of several groups, namely: paragraphs (text segmentation, graphic effects, font, color, images) and infographics. (diagrams, tables, maps). Let's consider them in more detail.

The main conclusion from the obtained results is that all the studied universities exploit the semiotic landscapes at their disposal to represent attractive educational brands on their websites as specific multimodal texts. The concept of multimodality of the websites of the analyzed American universities is manifested in the visual content through a series of paragraphs and infographic elements, the synthesis of which is determined by the combination of linguistic tools, visual content and web technologies of modern website construction (Fedorenko & Sheremete, 2023). The most common visual content used on the websites of American universities includes: unique photographs and color modes (photos of universities, their students, classrooms, laboratories, events, etc.) that help to clearly illustrate the offered educational services and provide the desired emotional mood; infographics and data visualization, which is an effective way of combining text layout with images, tables, graphs, etc. to present complex information; video interviews with students, graduates, videos about studying at the university. It has been established that the use of video is a fairly popular form of visual content. With the help of videos, universities not only diversify the content of their websites, but also satisfy to some extent the needs of users who prefer visual images. It is observed that the interaction of various semiotic systems creates a single visual, structurally and functionally complete image of a university that is attractive and popular among readers of a given website.

References

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