Multimodality

Mode Semiotic properties

Writing Name
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A theory that deals with meaning: social semiotics.

Meaning, communication and social matters.

The effects of globalization: local and global.

Resources for representation.

Cultural difference and communication.

General semiotic principles to all human communication. Human make signs in which meaning and form
stand in a motivated relation. The interest of the signer maker, using cultural resources. There is no
meaning without framing.

Modes are compared.

Communication and meaning. The landscape of communication is marked by forms of knowledge

production; forms and principles of text-meaning composition; and social and semiotic blurring: the
dissolution, abolition of frames and boundaries.

A prospective theory of communication

 A rhetorical approach to communication. To acknowledge the rhetor’s interest. Maker of

representation are makers of knowledge.
 Production. Meaning is made material. Production has semiotic (form as content), conceptual
(content as concepts) and affective (semiosis as expressive, reflecting interest) features.

Aptness of the mean of representation

Narratives

Genres. Reproduce and reinforce beliefs of how social reality is structured.

While the media in general can be said to function “ideologically” in as much as their texts carry norms
and values, they neither express nor convey a single ideology. Instead, the various genres imply
particular, partial versions of social reality; they also address different audiences and presumably may
mean different things to different people.

Receptions
What is multimodality?

The use of several semiotic modes in the design of a semiotic product or event' (2001: 20).

The term multimodality is, however, strongly linked with three perspectives on representation and
communication, social semiotics, discourse analysis and interactional analysis.

A key aspect of multimodality is indeed the analysis of language, but language as it is nestled and
embedded within a wider semiotic frame.

Multimodality is gaining pace as a research approach, as speech and writing no longer appear adequate
in understanding representation and communication in a variety of fields, and the need to understand
the complex ways in which speech and writing interact with 'nonverbal' modes can no longer be
avoided.

 there is no monomodal culture

 the need to understand language in relation to non-linguistic modes of communication -
particularly gesture, space, gaze and posture. This enables patterns and narratives of the use of
modes to be seen over time and for connections to be made with respect to practices across
different technologies
 it focus on how the visual and other modes are configured and put to work for the purposes of
society - and how (as well as why) this might be redesigned

Key concepts

These concepts are mode, materiality, modal affordance, meaning potential or metafunction, and
interserniotic or intermodal relationships.

Communication shaping the domain of meaning.

Communication is semiotic work, and semiotics’ work is in the domain of the social. Changes produced
by social semiotics are meaningful, and meaning is made in communication.

Communication is multimodal: by speech, by gaze, by actions, by touch