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Studies of multimodality have significantly advanced our understanding of the potential of different semiotic resources—verbal, visual, aural, and kinetic—to make meaning and allow people to achieve various social purposes such as persuading, entertaining, and explaining. Yet little is known about the role that individual nonverbal resources and their interaction with language and with each other play in concealing and supporting, or drawing attention to and subverting, social boundaries and inequality, political or commercial agendas. This volume brings together contributions by rominent and emerging scholars that address this gap through the critical analysis of multimodality in popular culture texts and semiotic practices. It connects multimodal analysis to critical discourse analysis, demonstrating the value of different approaches to multimodality for building a better understanding of critical issues of central interest to discourse analysis, semiotics, applied linguistics, education, cultural and media studies.
As a founder and leading figure in multimodality and social semiotics, Theo van Leuween has made significant contributions to a variety of research fields, including discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, communication and media studies, education, and design. In celebration of his illustrious research career, this volume brings together a group of leading and emerging scholars in these fields to review, explore and advance two central research agendas set out by van Leeuwen: the categorisation of the meaning potential of various semiotic resources and the examination of their uses in different forms of communication, and the critical analysis of the interaction between semiotic forms, norms ...
Internet-mediated communication is pervasive nowadays, in an age in which many people shy away from physical settings and often rely, instead, on social media and messaging apps for their everyday communicative needs. Since pragmatics deals with communication in context and how more gets communicated than is said (or typed), applications of this linguistic perspective to internet communication, under the umbrella label of internet pragmatics, are not only welcome, but necessary. The volume covers straightforward applications of pragmatic phenomena to internet interactions, as happens with speech acts and contextualization, and internet-specific kinds of communication such as the one taking place on WhatsApp, WeChat and Twitter. This collection also addresses the role of emoticons and emoji in typed-text dialogues and the importance of “physical place” in internet interactions (exhibiting an interplay of online-offline environments), as is the case in the role of place in locative media and in broader place-related communication, as in migration.
The transformation of book formats, production technologies and reading practices has always been at the heart of any social change. Sumin Zhao offers an in-depth study of an emerging book format - book apps for young children - through the theoretical lens of social semiotics, considering them as both a techno-social phenomenon and a semiotic artefact. She illustrates how on the one hand, the design and use of book apps is shaped by public, professional (design) and research discourses of technology, childhood and literacy - and on the other, how the interactive design of apps has the potential to reshape literacy and meaning-making practices in early childhood. Zhao examines the ways in which the public, app designers and academic researchers discuss, debate, and understand children's book apps and eBooks, before looking closely at the meaning-making potentials of interactive design features such as touch. Showcasing various discourse analytical tools and concepts of the social semiotic theory this book illustrates how fine-grained semiotic analyses can be used to investigate multiple dimensions of a social phenomenon and unpack its complexity.
By carefully conceptualising the domestic in relation to the self and the photographic, this book offers a unique contribution to both photography theory and criticism, and life-narrative studies. Jane Simon brings together two critical practices into a new conversation, arguing that artists who harness domestic photography can advance a more expansive understanding of the autobiographical. Exploring the idea that self-representation need not equate to self-portraiture or involve the human form, artists from around the globe are examined, including Rinko Kawauchi, Catherine Opie, Dayanita Singh, Moyra Davey, and Elina Brotherus, who maintain a personal gaze at domestic detail. By treating the representation of interiors, domestic objects, and the very practice of photographic seeing and framing as autobiographical gestures, this book reframes the relationship between interiors and exteriors, public and private, and insists on the importance of domestic interiors to understandings of the self and photography. The book will be of interest to scholars working in photographic history and theory, art history, and visual studies.
This volume develops a new multimodal semiotic approach to the study of communication, examining how multimodal discourse is construed transmedially and interculturally and how new technologies and cultural stances inform communicative contexts across the world. It contributes to current theoretical debates in the disciplines of semiotics, linguistics, multimodality, and pragmatics, as well as those aspects of pedagogy and film studies that engage with the notions of text and narrative by addressing questions such as: How do we study multimedia communication? How do we incorporate the impact of new media technologies into the study of Linguistics and Semiotics? How do we construe culture in modern communication? How useful are the current multidisciplinary approaches to multimodal communication? Through the analysis of specific case studies that are developed within diverse academic disciplines and which draw on a range of theoretical frameworks, the goal of this book is to provide a basis for an overarching framework that can be applied by scholars and students with different academic and cultural backgrounds.
The collection demonstrates the ways in which established traditions and scholars have come together under the umbrella of linguistic ethnography to explore important questions about how language and communication are used in a range of settings and contexts, and with what effect.
This book explores the problem-oriented interdisciplinary research movement comprised of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) for scholars, teachers, and students from many backgrounds. Beginning with a Preface by renowned CDA/CDS scholar Ruth Wodak, it introduces CDA/CDS through examples of what its research looks like, delineates various precursors to CDA/CDS and important foundational concepts and theories, and traces its development from its early years until it became established. After the relationship between CDA and CDS is discussed, seven commonly cited approaches to CDA/CDS are outlined, including their connections and differences, their origins an...
This user-friendly student guide is the essential resource for all those engaged in studying systemic functional linguistics (SFL). Assuming no prior knowledge, this guide is divided into nine chapters which can be read independently of one another and used for purposes of reference. The reading section maps out and mediates the key SFL literature. The application guides show how SFL has been and can be applied to various domains, from translation to healthcare communication. The term guides demystify the core terminology and the vocabulary guides aid readers in dealing with the most commonly used terms in text analysis. Systemic Functional Linguistics is an invaluable guidebook for all those studying functional grammar and SFL within linguistics, applied linguistics and related courses.
This handbook focuses on the often neglected dimension of interpretation in educational research. It argues that all educational research is in some sense ‘interpretive’, and that understanding this issue belies some usual dualisms of thought and practice, such as the sharp dichotomy between ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’ research. Interpretation extends from the very framing of the research task, through the sources which constitute the data, the process of their recording, representation and analysis, to the way in which the research is finally or provisionally presented. The thesis of the handbook is that interpretation cuts across the fields (both philosophically, organizat...