Multimodality, Social Semiotics

The first part of this work deals with multimodality in stylistics, drawing from social semiotics in its understanding of multimodality. A critical overview of multimodality in linguistic research is given, with special emphasis on multimodal stylistics, a new and developing discipline. In the second part, emphasis is put on multimodal novel, and an analysis of the mode of typography in a postmodern multimodal novel "Otok" (1977) by Marin Carić is performed.

This article explores how online videos with a pedagogical focus can possibly make an impact on our current language teaching and learning practices. The affordance of videos to create multimodal content that can be shared with the public allows content creators to use a wide range of resources, such as spoken and written language, gestures, screen layout, etc., to create learning environments that can promote an awareness of a multimodal perspective to the understanding of a particular kind of professional communication context, such as job interviews, as illustrated in this article. By analyzing a series of videos on job interviews using multimodal semiotic analysis, I argue that these videos, which I call pedagogical vlogs, are helpful not only in terms of teaching the language skills required for job interviews, but also to help create a multimodal understanding of job interviews through the strategic orchestration of multiple semiotic modes. The popularity of pedagogical vlogs, as well as their affordance to provide lesson content created by the public, offer new possibilities for language teaching and learning, but it has yet only received scant attention from applied linguistics and language education researchers. This article aims to start a dialog on the pedagogical implications of this new form of learning so as to uncover the potentials offered by pedagogical vlogs in education.

This paper presents the qualitative examination of teacher recruitment commercials over fifteen years to reveal the evolution of education objectives and teacher requirements of the Singapore education system. The commercials analysed comprise ten advertisements that convey messages predominantly via visual or linguistic resources and were selected based on their availability at time of research. Kress and van Leeuwen’s framework to multimodal analysis was employed in examining these commercials.

Semiotic resources in the commercials were examined to reveal meanings conveyed, from which teacher roles, student types and education outcome expectations were identified. These were discussed together with observed representations of ethnicity, gender and power, surfacing the changing teacher requirements and education objectives of Singapore education. The analysis revealed the education system’s progressive objectives, from imparting content and knowledge to character development and instilling of aspirational notions, equipping students with right values, solid knowledge and future-ready skills, remodelling teachers into skillful educators and ultimately inspiring mentors. The paper concludes with a calling to extend the analysis scope under social semiotics and to further examine changing student profiles, which shall surely illuminate future paths of Singapore education.

Keywords: advertising, education objectives, multimodal communication, Singapore education system, sociolinguistics, teacher requirements, teaching

Die Zeitschriftenforschung hat sich zu einem produktiven und interdisziplinär verzweigten Arbeitsfeld entwickelt. Auffallend ist dabei jedoch die bislang geringe Beachtung der multimodalen Beschaffenheit des Mediums. Die Beiträger_innen des interdisziplinären Bandes legen erstmals einen besonderen Fokus auf die Text-Bild-Strategien Illustrierter Zeitschriften und setzen diese zudem in Bezug zur gesteigerten Tendenz ästhetischer und kultureller Selbst- und Metareflexion um 1900. So leistet der Band eine stärkere Konturierung der medialen Eigenlogik Illustrierter Zeitschriften vor dem Hintergrund der für das Medium konstitutiven Verzahnung von Bild und Text.

Do they have to be the same?" The pre-service teacher asking this question was wondering if the essay she had written had to be the same, word for word, as the digital multimodal composition (DMC) she was creating. Similar to the way I used to ask my high school students, I had asked my pre-service teachers enrolled in a technology and digital media class first to write a This I Believe essay (National Public Radio) and second to create a DMC using the essay. The written essay involved writing about something in which you believe in 350-500 words and uploading it to the This I Believe website. The DMC involved combining an audio recording of the essay with moving and still images, music, video, and/or other media effects using video editing software. The purpose of writing the essay and creating the DMC was to have the pre-service teachers consider the affordances and constraints of different combinations of modes for conveying meaning to intended audiences.

We document the language learning outcomes of an informant affiliated with a community of scanlation when participating in practices of reading, translation, typesetting and proofreading of mangas. We draw on a social-semiotic approach to multimodality and we use ethnographic and discourse-analytic techniques to examine a corpus of semi-structured interviews, recordings of onscreen desktop activity and scanned pages of manga translated by the informant and the corresponding original pages in English. The findings reveal that the informant actively constructs meaning of texts combining verbal, graphic and typographic semiotic resources and that she achieves a remarkable awareness of the specific and socio-culturally situated nature of the use of these resources.

The (ab)use of a highly scientific and quaintly specialised language characterises the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory as a geek-oriented production which, by means of its humorous multimodal discourse, seems to be addressed to a community of speakers who co-share the same lexicon, ideas and habits, i.e. mainly young nerds. However, while in the source text the humorous discourse is primarily construed around some geeky in-jokes, the Italian audiovisual dubbed product seems to completely change the context of situation, thus avoiding any reference to the specificity of the language of the source text. The result is a predictable failure to accommodate the humorous discourse of the American series, preventing the Italian audience a full appreciation of its subtle humour. By means of an integrated multimodal and corpus-based approach, this paper aims to introduce the ‘community factor’ in the analysis of joke typologies staged in AVT artefacts. A multimodal model, which takes into consideration semiotically expressed humour, is introduced here, with the aim of capturing some interesting instantiations of the humorous discourse and specialised language which need to be re-allocated in the target product.

Multimodal fiction, as recently studied by Hallet (2009), Gibbons (2012), and Maziarczyk (2011; 2012), among others, is the phenomenon shared by those novels which combine various semiotic modes in the development of the narrative. The purpose of the present work is to account for the most salient semiotic resources used in the multimodal novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (2004). In view of the work which still needs to be done in the field, and the increasing profusion and diversity of multimodal literary forms in recent years, this study aims at throwing new light upon the diverse and significant ways in which the strategic inclusion of various semiotic resources operates in fiction.

Die prozessuale Wirkungsweise der Immersion beschränkt sich nicht nur auf technisch-apparative Medien oder computergestützte Mediensysteme, sondern zeigt sich innerhalb zahlreicher Forschungsdiskurse ebenfalls bei analogen oder monomodalen Medien. Die Gradstufen und Ausprägungen von immersiven Prozessen ereignen sich dabei stets über ein bivektorielles Induktionsschema: Entweder wird Immersion maßgeblich über ein mediales Reiz- beziehungsweise Strukturangebot über sensomotorisch fundierte Wahrnehmungsprozesse eingeleitet oder über weitestgehend subjektive, phantasmatisch-imaginäre Annäherungen an ein Medium. Der Immersionsprozess besitzt allerdings nicht nur das Potenzial zur Analyse und Beschreibung spezifischer Rezeptionsprozesse im Verhältnis von Medium, Interface und Rezipient, sondern er lässt sich als eine komplexe Modellannahme zur Beschreibung einer Kulturtheorie medialer Hybride verstehen, die der Medienevolution der letzten Jahrzehnte adäquat Rechnung tragen kann. In Anknüpfung an Ernst Cassirers animal symbolicum und Hans Jonas’ homo pictor formuliert dieser Artikel die These des homo immergens.

Institutional communication often needs to communicate to the general
public by disseminating juridic and administrative content. The article analyses the institutional communication campaign that appeared on public administration websites during the COVID-19 pandemic, renamed with the hashtag #iorestoacasa. It analyses both the language and the relevant pragmatic and textual characteristics of the corpus of texts collected, and the images (infographics and others) that accompanied the dissemination of texts on institutional websites. The conclusions still show a lack of capacity to create fully multimodal documnets in which text and images are integrated.

How moving image and multimodality could contribute to the image? How to get engaged into telling the kinds of mode of the narrative rather than standing back having a kind of a media studies approach to film? The aim of this paper is to raise the question of how meaning is made via the multimodal approach which implies that film is a form which is built on other cultural forms (Burn, 2003: 16). It looks into the process of documenting cinematic facts, thinking about the functions of the modes and by breaking the modes down and single them out. The film semiotic approach of how film makes meaning by Christian Metz (in: Burn, 2003: 3) is the starting point of looking into the digital era where all the modes are fed into the moving image. It is necessary to be sure not to miss an aspect that could be really important and to still keep the role of education clear.

Common patterns of interactions are altered in the digital world and new patterns of communication have emerged, challenging previous notions of what communication actually is in the contemporary age. Online configurations of interaction, such as video chats, blogging, and social networking practices demand profound rethinking of the categories of linguistic analysis, given the blurring of traditional distinctions between oral and written discourse in digital texts. This volume reconsiders underlying linguistic and semiotic frameworks of analysis of spoken and written discourse in the light of the new paradigms of online communication, in keeping with a multimodal corpus linguistics theoretical framework.

Typical modes of online interaction encompass speech, writing, gesture, movement, gaze, and social distance. This is nothing new, but here Sindoni asserts that all these modes are integrated in unprecedented ways, enacting new interactional patterns and new systems of interpretation among web users. These "non verbal" modes have been sidelined by mainstream linguistics, whereas accounting for the complexity of new genres and making sense of their educational impact is high on this volume’ s agenda. Sindoni analyzes other new phenomena, ranging from the intimate sphere (i.e. video chats, personal blogs or journals on social networking websites) to the public arena (i.e. global-scale transmission of information and knowledge in public blogs or media-sharing communities), shedding light on the rapidly changing global web scenario.

RESUMEN Observar y describir lo que ocurre en el aula desde una perspectiva multimodal es esencial para comprender el rol del profesor en el aprendizaje de un grupo de escolares Sordos 2 y el potencial semiótico de los recursos utilizados para enseñar. En el presente artículo se asume como supuesto principal que no sólo se significa mediante la lengua escrita, oral o de señas, si no que existen múltiples recursos semióticos que aportan a la construcción de conocimientos curriculares. Esta investigación persigue la descripción desde el enfoque multimodal de los medios y modos semióticos utilizados por un docente especialista en biología y otro en historia, geografía y ciencias sociales, para mediar la apropiación del conocimiento y construcción de nuevos conceptos en sus alumnos Sordos que cursan 8° básico. A partir de la observación del desarrollo de una unidad didáctica en cada una de dichas asignaturas y el registro fotográfico de las clases, se lleva a cabo un análisis multimodal del discurso enfocado en los medios semióticos utilizados para enseñar. Se destaca la construcción de significados a partir del uso simultáneo de la lengua de señas en la interacción cara a cara junto con proyecciones computacionales de imágenes y la escritura sobre la pizarra, para la construcción de clasificaciones, definiciones analíticas y descripciones visuales, empleadas por ambos profesores frente a su grupo de estudiantes Sordos. ABSTRACT It is very important to observe and describe what happens in a classroom from a multimodal perspective, in order to understand both the role of the teacher in learning in a group of deaf students and the semiotic potential of the resources used to teach. On one hand, this research takes as the main resource not only the use of written, oral or sign language, but also several semiotic resources that contribute to the construction of curricular knowledge. On the other hand, it pursues the description from the multimodal approach of the media and semiotic modes used by a specialist teacher of biology and other of history, geography and social sciences, to mediate knowledge appropriation and construction of new concepts in deaf students who attend 8 th grade. From the observation of the unfolding of a teaching unit in each of these subjects and the photographic record of the lessons, a Multimodal Discourse Analysis was focused on the semiotic means used to teach. The construction of meaning highlights from the simultaneous use of sign language in face to face interaction and computer projections of images together with writing on the board, for the meaning making of classifications, analytical definitions and visual descriptions, deployed by both teachers interacting with a group of deaf students.

Umberto Eco (1975; 1985) has invariantly maintained that specular images have no semiosic status, basically because they stand in front rather than instead of an object. In his Kant and the Platypus (1997), Eco returns offering reasons to exclude specular images from signs, and definitely classifies mirrors as visual prosthetic devices. In this paper I argue that Eco is partly right and partly wrong. He is right inasmuch as he claims that seeing an object in a mirror must count as a case of seeing that object rather than as a case of seeing a sign of that object (or, a sign standing for a propositional content about that object). The only reason why we should agree with Eco on this point, however, is that otherwise we would be forced to admit that also when we see the object in normal visual perception, with no mirror involved, what we really see is a sign. But then Eco is wrong because he does not acknowledge that, although mirror phenomena do have no semiosic status per se, they may acquire it by taking advantage of independent sign-functions – thus coming to be part of what I call parasiticly semiosic phenomena. Specifically, since an object that is visually perceived in a mirror may appear to have some spatial or topological properties that the real object does not possess, it is sufficient for the mirror phenomenon to exploit an independent sign-function whose expressions admit spatial or topological properties among their distinctive traits in order for it to become fully (though parasiticly) semiosic.

By drawing on visual data ranging from printed advertisements to digital photography, this book provides a fine-grained social semiotic analysis of a full range of visual texts in terms of specified periods, offering a complex interpretation of what different social functions these texts realise in a semiotic artefact. Situated in the semiotic landscape of the city of Hong Kong, the current study demonstrates that the social context of meaning making is an important feature of a social semiotic visual analysis. For example, it shows that the widespread use of smartphone applications has a significant impact on the personal photography of Hong Kong females, leading to socio-cultural transformations that are reflected in the representational aesthetic practices of digital photographs for self-modelling as well as an emerging gendered identity within the community. In addition, the social semiotic analysis of printed advertisements in magazines on slimming products and services also offers deep insights into the media ideologies relating to female body idealisation, gender roles and stereotypes, providing a useful sociologically relevant analysis on the basis of analytical tools from social semiotics and further pointing to the need for combining social semiotics with sociological theory and beyond. The book also discusses how social semiotic analysis might attend to the broader discursive practices, as in the case of TV commercials focussed on personal loans and luxury property. The desire of a hedonistic lifestyle has been the driving force behind these discursive practices in which social actors are idealised through semiotic resources in such a way that their semiotically shaped identities in the advertising discourse become a site of ideology on the basis of which intertextuality and the broader discourse of social stereotypes could be analysed. This book will therefore be of interest to a very wide readership in various academic fields in arts and social sciences such as semiotics, visual studies, design studies, media and cultural studies, anthropology and sociology.

Deep learning is a new area of machine learning research that imitates the way the human brain works. It has a great number of successful applications in speech recognition, image classification, and natural language processing. It is a particular approach to build and train neural networks. A deep neural network consists of a hierarchy of layers, whereby each layer transforms the input data into more abstract representations. Deep networks have been successfully applied to unsupervised and supervised feature learning for single modalities like text, images or audio. As the developments in technology, an application of deep networks to learn features over multiple modalities has surfaced. It involves relating information from multiple sources. The relevance of multi-modality has enhanced tremendously due to extensive use of social media and online advertising. Social media has been a convenient platform for voicing opinions from posting message to uploading a media file, or any combination of messages.There are a number of methods that can be used for multimodal deep learning, but the most efficient one is Deep Boltzmann Machine (DBM). The DBM is a fully generative model which can be utilized for extracting features from data with certain missing modalities. DBM is constructed by stacking one Gaussian RBM and one standard binary RBM. An RBM has three components: visible layer, hidden layer, and a weight matrix containing the weights of the connections between visible and hidden units. There are no connections between the visible units or between the hidden units. That is the reason why this model is called restricted.

Nationalism, once declared an obsolete force, especially after World War II and the
establishment of the European Union, has obviously returned with renewed vigour. We
encounter passionate nationalist movements everywhere, in Africa, South‐America, the
Middle East, Southern Europe, and in the successor states of the former Soviet Union.
Frequently, new nationalisms emerge, tied to religious beliefs such as Islamic nationalism.
Indeed, it seems that – in spite of an ever more connected and globalised world – more
borders and walls are being constructed to define nation states and protect them from
dangers, both alleged and real.
In the following, I will first discuss salient concepts such as nationalism and, inasmuch as they
relate to it, also transnationalism, post‐nationalism and cosmopolitanism. This necessarily
brief summary leads to an integrated critical framework for (national) identity politics
embedded in a discourse‐historical approach, currently imagined as ‘body‐politics’ in many
national publics (Musolff 2010; Norocel 2013; Wodak 2015). Thus, we are confronted with,
on the one hand, globalized tendencies to transcend the nation state frequently promoted as
post‐nationalism; and, on the other hand, with strong and virulent tendencies proposing a return to the nation‐state, defined via cultural and ethnic (as well as racist and racialised) criteria. Finally, some texts representing re‐nationalizing identity politics and politics of the past drawn from Hungarian and Austrian right‐wing populist parties’ campaigns serve to illustrate ever new border and body politics.

È estatico ogni discorso che, costruendosi nel linguaggio e col linguaggio, rappresenta nondimeno una fuoriuscita da esso, un bloccarsi della semiosi, un venir meno delle distinzioni che fondano il senso. Trattasi dunque di un’impostura? Dell’evocazione impossibile, fra le maglie dell’immanenza, di una dimensione trascendente nella quale e verso la quale la prima si sfaldi, perdendo la consistenza di strutture e opposizioni? Rispondere affermativamente sarebbe forse semplicistico, sarebbe considerare l’estasi come puro effetto ottico, come sorta di trompe-l’oeil mistico. In realtà, come ogni trompe-l’oeil, anche l’estasi rinvia a qualcosa di più della propria semplice rappresentazione. Essa rimanda ai pregiudizi inconfessati di un’ideologia semiotica, alla trama nascosta, al negativo segreto che regge tutta la concezione moderna del senso e del linguaggio. Il discorso mistico, che corre parallelo e invisibile, spesso represso, a volte perseguitato, lungo tutta la storia delle religioni, esprime allora questo dubbio: e se il senso non fosse distinzione, separatezza, dualità? Se l’immanenza articolatoria che lo viviseziona non fosse che illusoria? A questo punta ogni racconto dell’estasi: al sospetto che i fondamenti della modernità, anti-mistici per definizione, non siano altro che una delle possibilità dell’umano, e che una storia non detta, in filigrana, si dipani accanto e sotto al moderno come traccia sbiadita di un altro percorso, di un altro modo d’intendere e di dire.

Signatim è termine raro. Compare in un passo attribuito all’autore Caio, all’interno dei cosiddetti Gromatici veteres, una raccolta di testi di agrimensura compilata nel V secolo d.C. “Gromatico” è infatti tutto ciò che si riferisce alla misurazione, divisione, e rappresentazione di terreni. Il termine deriva da “groma”, uno strumento che gli Etruschi prima, e poi i Romani, utilizzarono per tracciare sul territorio allineamenti ortogonali, necessari per la delimitazione di nuove città, quartieri, e strade, ma anche per suddividere il terreno in quadrati o rettangoli, e renderne così calcolabile la superficie.
Nel passo di Caio si descrive una tecnica gromatica. Al fine di poter identificare anche in futuro i paletti interrati che delimitano il terreno, è necessario contraddistinguerli con un segno a forma di stella, la cosidetta “stella junior”. In questo contesto, “signatim” è dunque avverbio che designa la scrittura e la lettura di segni nella delineazione di frontiere. Quale parola più appropriata per evocare il lavoro della semiotica della cultura, la quale pure si occupa dei segni, delle tracce, delle marche che gli individui e le società producono nell’istituire la diversità? Per cartografare non colture ma culture, non gromatiche ma grammatiche, riconducendone le forme esuberanti all’ortogonalità di strutture soggiacenti?

While it is crystal clear that communication can draw on many semiotic resources, research in the humanities has hitherto strongly focused on its verbal manifestations. "Multimodality" labels a variety of approaches and theories trying to remedy this bias by investigating how for instance visuals, music, and sound contribute to meaning-making. The contours of what is developing into a new discipline begin to be discernible. This chapter provides a brief survey of various perspectives on multimodality, addresses the thorny issue of what should count as a mode, and makes suggestions for further development of the fledgling discipline.

With this dissertation, I developed the first creation-as-research thesis accepted in the Department of Education at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. This research methodology recognizes an interconnected process of creation and research as part of the development of artifacts that aim to directly enhance the discourse of a specified discipline.

My work examines the semiotics & cultural nuances of multimedia and interactivity within the context of instruction, focusing on theoretical and practical representations in video game design. There are 4 parts to this thesis:

1) A traditional written document

2) A 15-module online course in video game design entitled Gaming, Interactive, and Multiplatform Media

LINK: https://youtu.be/wS8o0w4cB-g

3) 15 summary videos of the online course in video game design

LINK: https://youtu.be/gYEEP5GVam0

4) The performative creation-as-research dissertation presentation.

LINK: https://youtu.be/XQL_7tRUlps

This thesis highlights the teaching practices surrounding video game design principles, while emulating those design principles as part of the instructional design, and submitted materials. The 4 parts of this thesis, collectively, are a manifestation of the findings in the written component, which suggests that video games, through their innate interactivity via the inclusion of multimedia as part of their design, hold critical implementation frameworks for course-based instructional design, when multimedia is used as part of the instructional process.

Contemporary societies are grappling with the social changes caused by the current communication landscape and complex textual habitats. To account for this complexity in meaning-making practices, some scholars have proposed the multimodal approach. This paper intends to introduce the core concepts of multimodality including semiotic resources, modes of communication, and intersemiotic relationships. It provides practical applications of multimodal analyses by examining printed and digital pages of educational materials. The final section proposes a set of recommendations to integrate the multimodal perspective in language classes, highlighting the need to make students aware of the new dynamics of meaning making, meaning negotiation, and meaning distribution. Resumen Las sociedades contemporáneas están enfrentándose a los cambios sociales provocados por el paisaje de comunicación actual y las complejidades de los hábitats textuales. Para dar cuenta de la complejidad en la construcción de significados, algunos académicos han propuesto el enfoque multimodal. Este escrito tiene la intención de introducir los conceptos básicos de la multimodalidad, tales como recursos semióticos, modos de comunicación y relaciones intersemióticas. Proporciono aplicaciones de análisis multimodal en páginas impresas y digitales de materiales educativos. La sección final propone un conjunto de recomendaciones para integrar la perspectiva multimodal en las clases de lenguas, destacando la necesidad de sensibilizar a los estudiantes sobre la nueva dinámica de creación, negociación y distribución de significados.

Photojournalism: A Social Semiotic Approach provides an analysis of press photography from a social semiotic perspective. It explores the role of photography in the news and how meanings are made in news photographs. It also investigates the meanings that are made at the intersection of words and images in the news story context. This is becoming increasingly important for multimodal news reporting in the twenty-first century. The book brings together the author's experience as a professional photographer, lecturer and researcher to provide readers with a comprehensive tool kit for analyzing images and text-image relations. It explores a wide range of case studies and will appeal to scholars in Social Semiotics, Linguistics, Communications Studies, Critical DIscourse Analysis and Media/Journalism Studies.

Pesatnya perkembangan teknologi membawa pengaruh kepada media. Dengan adanya era media baru, produsen iklan berlomba-lomba memproduksi iklan yang semenarik dan sekreatif mungkin untuk mencegah masyarakat dari rasa jenuh terhadap iklan. Salah satu cara yang digunakan oleh produsen iklan untuk menarik perhatian masyarakat adalah dengan menggunakan lebih dari satu moda dalam iklannya. Multimodalitas yang terdapat dalam iklan menjadi masalah yang diangkat dalam penelitian ini dengan data analisis berupa iklan gambar dari suatu produk makanan, yaitu Mie Sedaap rasa Korean Spicy Soup. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menganalisis makna atau pesan yang terkandung dalam iklan ini dengan mengidentifikasi metafungsi bahasa yang terkandung dalam moda verbal dan moda visual yang digunakan. Selain itu, analisis yang dilakukan bertujuan untuk melihat keberlindanan antara moda verbal dan moda visual. Dari analisis yang telah dilakukan, dalam upaya menunjukkan ciri khas produk, yaitu rasa pedas dengan cita rasa Korea, unsur-unsur dari moda verbal dan visual dalam iklan gambar ini saling melengkapi satu sama lain dengan baik.
Kata kunci: iklan, multimodalitas, metafungsi bahasa

Memes are a common way for individuals to communicate online.
Internet users often use memes to reply to each other on social
networking sites or other online forums. This research argues that
memes are successfully used for communication purposes
because certain memes (specifically image macros) are essentially
speech acts and are also understood as being speech acts by
internet users. When creating a meme, choices are made
concerning the specific semiotic resources to be used and the
internet community then interprets these resources to facilitate
communication between the meme creator and the internet
community. Memes can be recreated for different purposes and
therefore it is possible to group memes under already existing
speech acts and speculate about the ways in which these might
correspond to speech acts in the future. To accomplish this, a
limited amount of specific meme types are analysed and discussed.

This chapter explores the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze in order to understand classroom management in terms of the moving power-structure(s) in the teaching and learning context. The classroom dynamic presents a form of affective literacy or literacies in the framework of Multiple Literacies Theory (Masny, 2006). This is because the ways in which communication happens in the classroom demonstrates an affective map of the power flows in that context; and in this chapter this power differential is dealt with through ‘affectus’. The affective interactivity of literacies in classroom management is complementary to and congruent with the conceptual framework of this writing. This piece will focus on the Deleuze-Guattarian concepts of ‘anti-production’ (as presented in Anti-Oedipus) and the ‘order words’ (in A Thousand Plateaus), that will be unpacked and analysed in the specific educational context of classroom management and as pertaining to teacher education.

This study posits that using a range of modes and genres to construct argument can engender different ways of thinking about argument in the academic context. It investigates the
potentials and constraints of adopting a multimodal approach to constructing academic
argument. The research is situated within a seminar, in a second year Media course. Within this context, the study identifies the semiotic resources that students draw on and examines how they are employed to construct academic argument in three digital domains, namely video, comics and PowerPoint.

Grounded in a theory of multimodal social semiotics, this study posits that argument is a product of design, motivated by the rhetor’s interest in communicating a particular message, in a particular environment, and shaped by the available resources in the given environment. It proposes that argument is a cultural text form for bringing about difference (Kress 1989).
This view of argument recognises that argument occurs in relation to mode, genre, discourse and medium. The study illustrates how each of these social categories shapes argument
through textual analysis.

A framework based on Halliday’s metafunctional principle is proposed to analyse argument in multimodal texts. The framework combines theories from rhetoric and social semiotics. It offers analysis of ideational content, the ways social relations are established, and how organising principles assist in establishing coherence in argument. The analysis of the data (video, comics and PowerPoint presentations) demonstrates that the framework can be applied across genres and media.

The significance of the study is threefold. Theoretically, it contributes towards theorising a theory of argument from a multimodal perspective. Methodologically, it puts forward a
framework for analysing multimodal arguments. Pedagogically, it contributes towards developing and interrogating a pedagogy of academic argument that is relevant to contemporary communication practices.

Using a vast spectrum of highly hybridized forms of contemporary filmmaking, animated documentary – an increasingly ubiquitous mode of representation – examines different aspects of representing reality. Likewise in academia, it keeps receiving scholarly attention from the side of different disciplines and fields of study. In spite of all these interests and attentions, this mode of filmmaking inquires more in-depth scrutiny not only because studies on animated documentary may result in more conscious utilization of the mode, but also as Ward suggests it may “potentially provide answers to some of the more troubling questions asked of documentary as a field.” (2005, p. 99). One of the obstacles which slows down in-depth studies of animated documentary is the complexity of reality representation processes in such films. Therefore, it would be a helpful practice to set up (a) framework(s) that make(s) it possible to discuss the intricate processes in animated documentary. The present study is the first stage to propose such a model. To this end, drawing on the principles of Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006), the study embarks on an initial framework for analyzing animated documentary. As a work-in-progress, the proposed framework will then be adopted for studying animated documentaries based on Paul Wells’ typology (Wells, 1997).

It is often thought that consciousness has a qualitative dimension that cannot be tracked by science. Recently, however, some philosophers have argued that this worry stems not from an elusive feature of the mind, but from the special nature of the concepts used to describe conscious states. Marc Champagne draws on the neglected branch of philosophy of signs or semiotics to develop a new take on this strategy. 

The term “semiotics” was introduced by John Locke in the modern period – its etymology is ancient Greek, and its theoretical underpinnings are medieval. Charles Sanders Peirce made major advances in semiotics, so he can act as a pipeline for these forgotten ideas. Most philosophers know Peirce as the founder of American pragmatism, but few know that he also coined the term “qualia,” which is meant to capture the intrinsic feel of an experience. Since pragmatic verification and qualia are now seen as conflicting commitments, Champagne endeavors to understand how Peirce could (or thought he could) have it both ways. The key, he suggests, is to understand how humans can insert distinctions between features that are always bound.

Recent attempts to take qualities seriously have resulted in versions of panpsychism, but Champagne outlines a more plausible way to achieve this. So, while semiotics has until now been the least known branch of philosophy ending in –ics, his book shows how a better understanding of that branch can move one of the liveliest debates in philosophy forward.

Di tutte le annunciazioni che popolano la storia umana e le sue svariate tradizioni, al semiologo non interessa la fonte in sé, il numinoso che all’umano si rivolge per significargli di volta in volta la propria presenza, intenzione, sensibilità; interessa, piuttosto, il modo in cui a seconda delle epoche storiche, dei contesti culturali, delle vicende sociali, ma anche delle sensibilità individuali, uomini e donne hanno utilizzato i materiali del mondo, quelli dell’immanenza, per forgiare i significanti del divino. Ovvero, specularmente, il modo in cui hanno immaginato, e creduto con fermezza, che tali materiali divenissero d’un tratto appannaggio di una divina intenzione di comunicare, stoffa della rivelazione, parole annuncianti. Al teologo, non al semiologo, spetta immaginare la ricostruzione della totalità a fronte della quale si dipana il messaggio divino nella sua vicenda immanente. Al semiologo tocca invece un compito che è insieme più modesto e più costrittivo; innanzitutto raccogliere e inventariare queste tracce: in quali circostanze gli uomini e le donne hanno raccontato e raccontano di un loro incontro con il divino? Utilizzando quali segni? Piegandoli a quali necessità comunicative? Il compito successivo, più arduo, è analizzare questi segni, con gli strumenti di cui dispone la metodologia semiotica, per capire se si possano in qualche modo catalogare, suddividere in tipologie, distribuire in atlanti che, anche al di là e a dispetto delle differenze d’origine storica e confessionale, manifestino nondimeno dinamiche comuni nella costruzione e nell’elaborazione del linguaggio.

Semiotics (sometimes spelled “semeiotic”) is the name first given by John Locke, and later reprised by Charles S. Peirce, for the “doctrine of signs,” or the study of how some things can stand for other things to still other things. This deliberate inquiry can be contrasted with “folk semiotic” accounts, which assume that there is some intrinsic feature about, say, the human voice or a painted board that makes them capable of signifying. Such a naive assumption does not withstand serious scrutiny. From a philosophical standpoint, what makes something a sign is an involvement in a specific sort of triadic relation. This relation is found in human/nonhuman and deliberate/nondeliberate signs alike. Semiosis, the action of signs, is what permits communication, but it is wider than communication. For example, if while in an adjacent room I smell that the turkey in the oven is ready, my pet dog can smell it too, and the turkey is not trying to “tell” us anything. But if the cook in the kitchen tells me it is ready, I receive that message, while my dog hears the sounds but is none the wiser (in contemporary semiotic parlance, my dog and I couple our Umwelten via indices, but the symbols at hand generate interpretants only in my anthroposemiosis). In spite of the fact that it has a long and distinguished history (especially during the medieval period), general inquiry into signs became an organized research program only in the mid-20th century. Today, in addition to philosophers, semiotics attracts a wide range of scholars, such as ethologists, cognitive scientists, linguists, art historians, logicians, media theorists, literary critics, computer programmers, biologists, sociologists, and so on. From a methodological standpoint, then, parochialism is not an option. The scholarly literature can nevertheless be fruitfully divided into theoretical and applied strands. Not surprisingly, most philosophers drawn to semiotic questions work in the former strand. Semiotics is not to be confused with “semiology,” a (now largely defunct) project that originated in the lectures of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and which was active in the 1960s, mainly in France. Semiotics, by contrast, is a vibrant tradition that continues to flourish worldwide. Although some persist in employing the term “semiotics” when discussing narrow studies that focus exclusively on cultural codes, such terminological misuse masks the fact that a study of signs is broader than a study of language. A sustained philosophy of signs, then, promises (as Locke initially surmised) to yield truly novel insights.

The phenomenon of multimodality has, as Jewitt (2009: 3) observes, generated interest "across many disciplines...against the backdrop of considerable social change". Contemporary societies are grappling with the social implications of the rapid increase in sophistication and range of multimodal practices, particularly within interactive digital media, so that the study of multimodality also becomes essential within an increasing range of practical domains. As a result of this increasing interest in multimodality, scholars, teachers and practitioners are on the one hand uncovering many different issues arising from its study, such as those of theory and methodology, while also exploring multimodality within an increasing range of domains, for example, corporate advertising, cartoons, museums etc (e.g.

The technological progress of the 21st Century has meant a great shift from the traditional ways of interaction between people, granting the opportunity to share instantly whatever information they want by any means (i.e. voice, text, video, etc.). It is in this context that education needs to accommodate to the present age, moving forward nowadays traditional, print-based education and curriculum and incorporating these advancements into our teaching practices, allowing teachers to prepare their students to the world they live in.
This work aims to revisit the multimodal approach for EFL teaching and its influence over learners’ motivation and participation in the EFL classroom, tackling the belief that the use of different modes, making use of new technologies, would enhance students’ motivation and therefore, learners will learn better and participate more. In this research, students’ prior levels of participation and their motivation for learning English will be analyzed in order to compare this results it with those obtained after carrying out the implementation of an experimental, carefully designed teaching unit. To do so, this paper draws on insights from practical contexts, namely two set of questionnaires designed for students to measure the aforementioned issues before and after the implementation of the teaching unit, but also to find out students perspective towards using a multimodal approach in the EFL classroom, at the thorough understanding of any possible setback that might be experienced.

Makalah ini bertujuan untuk menganalisis iklan sunsilk nutrien sampo ginseng (SNSG) yang berbentuk audiovisual. Analisis dalam makalah ini menggunakan pendekatan semiotik yang difokuskan kepada multimodal sistem yang meliputi aspek linguistik, visual, audio, gestural, dan letak (Anstey dan Bull 2010; Bateman dan Schmidt, 2012; dan Chandler, 2007).

The evolution of comparative literature has been revealing, for more than a century, a sinuous process of self-definition: as of the beginning of the 20 th century, it has been emerging like a diverse set of research, with studies covering "international literary relations", from a historical perspective in line with the established tradition of founders and eventually building a comparative poetics, whose necessity and legitimacy are nowadays acknowledged. As far as its specific field is a "tertium comparationis, that does not belong to any of the studied texts" – or, we may add, to none of the domains to which it is associated in an interdisciplinary way – but "maintains relations with each of these", general and comparative literature is being mistaken for a "methodological utopia" (Pageaux 2000: 35). This (also) involves a relatively unrestrictive delimitation of the object and working methods (Wellek 1965: 282-295; Étiemble 1963), with all the positive connotations or the opposite ones associated with this state of fact. At the "crossroads of certain sets", each with its particularities, comparative literature beneficially feeds on these very "interferences", "meetings, exchanges" (Pageaux 2000: 34 – 35) between literatures and between domains of study. However, its very flexibility – available for constant assimilation and adaptation – determines the problem of a rigorous comparatist "methodology", founded on a coherent theory (Greimas & Courtès 1979: 49), to remain yet unsolved. The contributions of Étiemble (1958; 1963), Munteano (1967) or Marino (1988; 1998), among others, built around the concepts of "invariant" and literary "constant" have thus shaped, as of the middle of the 20 th century, a completely up-to-date research programme – yet unfinished – able to associate literary and intercultural studies, comparative literature and (inter)cultural anthropology. Resurfacing, at about the same time, the "intersemiotic" relations between literature and arts, Jakobson (1963) foreshadowed, in turn, today’s multi- and intermedial studies, even the latter’s crossing with the wide domain of comparative literature, as it is now globally understood: like an eminently interdisciplinary and – how else if not – intercultural domain. As a form of reverse ekphrasis, a piece of music or a dance may re(-)present a literary text. This paper proposes an analysis on the measure in which the semio-narrative categories and the Greimasian actantial model are relevant for the understanding of choreographic discourse as reverse ekphrasis. In particular, the study considers choreographies inspired by literary (pre)texts or pre-established narrative frames. In dance, gestural statements can be narratively semantized, caught – and thus clarified – within a story and within a constitutive aesthetics of ambiguity.

IN MODERN MULTILINGUAL and multicultural societies the teaching of foreign languages is conducted within a communicative framework, thus, formally “registering” teaching
as a communicative discipline (Tokatlidou, 2004: 108). In the case of the
development of novel skills in different languages and more specifically
in the “partial” development of communicative skills in languages,
particularly foreign languages, it has become imperative for the foreign
language teacher in Greece to develop or use new techniques which will
aid and guide students, not only, in their learning process, but also, in
their personal, social and professional lives (ibid: 142). The process of
needs analysis thus becomes necessary so as to specify the needs of foreign
language students, and more specifically the needs of the particular
group of foreign language students which are under scrutiny.
There have been a diversity of bibliographical references which probe
into different modals concerning needs analysis. Nevertheless, it seems
that there is only one modal which shows positive results concerning
its application level - especially - in foreign language departments, in
tertiary education and this is the ethnographic model (ibid: 163-165).

Drawing from recent analytical developments in semiotics and postmodern
ethnography, this article exposes and assesses the combination of social
semiotics and fieldwork as a form of qualitative inquiry. Approaches to semiotics
and fieldwork are not new—structural ethnographers in cultural anthropology
and structural interactionists in sociology and communication studies
have previously laid the foundations for the integration of formal methods of
analysis and inductive approaches to data collection—yet, as this article
argues, structuralism’s limitations have hampered the growth of semiotics
within qualitative inquiry. By presenting social semiotics as a viable alternative
to structural semiotics, by describing in clear pedagogical fashion how
social semiotics can be used as a research strategy, and by exposing its potential
for applicability, this article attempts to bring sociosemiotic ethnography
to the forefront of contemporary qualitative inquiry.

Ironically, defining a hero, is a heroic endeavour in its own right, considering the diversity of hero types (mythological, epic, folk, national, local, up to family heroes), but also the diversity of cultural contexts, which underlie the production of various hero systems.1 Such phenomenological diversity has been tackled by different research areas as diverse as literary studies2, history folk studies, anthropology (Levi-Strauss),3 sociology (Mauss, Hubert)4 all contributing to the fuller understanding of the phenomenon, while also making the simple definition of it an impossible task. Notwithstanding this phenomenological and epistemological complexity, we contend that certain can be mapped out. What we have in mind are some universal traits of heroism, most notably the cultural and political functions of heroes across diverse contexts.
Among these the key function we would like to focus on is the hero’s role as a protector of the community which worships him with the belief that he will perpetuate their biological, cultural and political existence through space and time. To do so he needs to confront dangers and enemies incarnated in the image of his Arche opponent, the villain. This dialectically presupposing dichotomy, we contend, is still an existent mode of human perception and interaction with the world. What differs in modern times are the types of social actors that embody the positions of heroes and villains, as well as the means by which they are represented.

This study explores the image analysis practices of undergraduate translation trainees in a Greek university. The key research questions focused on the trainees’ perception of the role of visual literacy in translation, the nature of their verbal and visual associations and
activities effective for developing this role. Visual literacy, semiotics, and translation theories provided the conceptual framework for this multimodal semiotics approach to translation training, which guided my examination of the way the trainees described semiotic resources, how they used verbal and visual elements of a translation task, and the extent to which they focused on the visual. Expanding on the concept of mediation, I developed a ‘verbo-visual’ mediation model that included visual semiotic elements to provide a detailed description of the ways in which the trainees intervened in the translation process. Through an action research study I gauged the extent to which the trainees had developed visual literacy skills. I planned a series of tasks centred on the translation of a multimodal text from English into Greek. I used direct and video observation of the students as they performed the tasks and afterwards evaluated their translations. The main findings of my research reveal that the trainees found it difficult initially to consider all the semiotic elements of the data-text whilst simultaneously translating its verbal elements. However, by providing examples of potential verbal-visual interactions and reflecting on and modifying the tasks, I found that the trainees began to appreciate non-verbal elements as potential translational factors. I was thus able to demonstrate a raised level of awareness of the visual elements of multimodal texts to some extent for all trainees in this study. The research suggests that customized image analysis, photo-elicitation and visualization techniques may play a part in the improvement of translation training in a multimodal semiotics translation environment.