Una forma frecuente de medir y estimular el desarrollo narrativo infantil utiliza el recontado de una narración. En Chile, se han diseñado tareas considerando la estructura del input verbal, tanto en un nivel léxico-sintáctico como textual, estableciéndose –incluso– niveles de complejidad. En el marco del Proyecto FONDECYT 1130420, para elaborar un cuento infantil –input de la tarea de recontado– se hizo hincapié no solo en los rasgos verbales, sino también visuales del relato. De tal forma, se propuso un doble objetivo: (...) diseñar las imágenes de una historia potenciando su significado a través de una gramática visual y observar en qué medida estos elementos aparecen reflejados en el recontado oral de los sujetos. Para este propósito, junto a la Gramática de la Historia para el discurso, se consideró la Gramática de Diseño Visual y sus herramientas analíticas para la construcción de imágenes. El cuento se piloteó en una muestra de 20 pre-escolares de Kinder de un colegio particular subvencionado de la Región de Valparaíso. Sus discursos fueron videograbados, transcritos y analizados. Se observó que todas las imágenes narrativas aparecen mencionadas en más de un 60% de los recontados. Además, existen tres referidas en el 90% de los discursos infantiles y representan momentos cruciales del relato o cierta complejidad del input como la simultaneidad de acciones. Estos resultados permiten valorar la importancia de los elementos visuales del cuento en la tarea de recontado infantil. (shrink)

In a 2018 referendum, the Irish electorate voted in favour of repealing Ireland's quasi-total legal ban on abortion. The referendum campaign saw important public discussions regarding gender roles in twenty-first century Ireland. While the constitutional ban on abortion was condemned by abortion rights advocates for marginalising women's agency, the legislation which replaced it has not escaped criticism either. Therefore, questions surrounding the conceptualisation of women's agency in the 2018 referendum are still relevant today. Adopting a multimodal critical discourse analysis approach, (...) this paper analyses signage from the weeks before the vote to examine the discursive construction of women's agency in the linguistic landscape of the referendum campaign. I argue that many mainstream campaign organisations – including those arguing for liberalisation of abortion laws – were complicit in the discursive diminishment of women's agency, suggesting that the campaign did not necessarily challenge prevailing ideologies of gender and agency. (shrink)

This paper explores a semiotic notion of body as starting point for bridging biosemiotic with social semiotic theory. The cornerstone of the argument is that the social semiotic criticism of the classic view of meaning as double articulation can support the criticism of language-centrism that lies at the foundation of biosemiotics. Besides the pragmatic epistemological advantages implicit in a theoretical synthesis, I argue that this brings a semiotic contribution to philosophy of mind broadly. Also, it contributes to overcoming the polemic (...) in linguistics between, loosely put, cognitive universalism and cultural relativism. This possibility is revealed by the recent convergence of various semiotic theories towards a criticism of the classic notion of meaning as double articulation. In biosemiotics, the interest to explicate meaning as multiply articulated stems from the construal of Umwelt as relying on the variety of sense perception channels and semiotic systems that a species has at its disposal. Recently, social semiotics developed an unexplored interest for embodiment by starting from the other end, namely the consideration of the modal heterogeneity of meaning. To bridge these notions, I employ the cognitive semantic notion of embodiment and Mittelberg’s cognitive semiotic notion of exbodiment. In light of these, I explore the possible intricacies between the biosemiotic notion of primary modeling system and concepts referring to preconceptual structures for knowledge organization stemming from cognitive linguistics. Further, Mittelberg’s concept of exbodiment allows for a construal of meaning articulation as mediation between the exbodying and embodying directions of mind. (shrink)

Despite its apparent simplicity, the speech act of complimenting has received a great deal of attention in the literature. However, studies have mostly focused on compliments’ realization in face-to-face conversational exchanges, while they have often been neglected in other channels such as online communication. This article is intended to redress the balance in support of online exchanges. More specifically, we aim to investigate how users of online social networks like Facebook use compliments to evaluate others and strengthen social rapport in (...) English and Spanish. In order to do so, we gathered two balanced corpora in both languages. The samples were quantitatively and qualitatively analysed using a systemic functional framework. The analysis reveals that compliments constitute a system of choices where several available options help Facebook users to encode their evaluation of the other from various perspectives. Furthermore, results also show that despite superficial similarities, compliments in both languages follow remarkably different frequencies of use which reflect deep cultural differences. (shrink)

The rise in Study Abroad participation among college students has increased interest among educationalists wondering about the impact of SA on students, particularly when students return home without evidence of deep engagement and understanding of other cultures and people. The purpose of this case study was to locate one potential source of the meanings ascribed to the SA experience, through analysis of multimodal representations on the institutional website of a popular SA program provider. In this study, Kress’ model of multimodal (...) social semiotic communication was employed in the analysis of the ensemble of modes of communication on the website, and their role in the production and dissemination of discourses of SA. Findings indicate that discourses of tourism prevail over discourses of education, and the representations enacted on the institutional website are mirrored in the discursive practices of students. (shrink)

Contemporary universities are characteristic of an evident proliferation of corporate discourse. A sole concentration on the production of new knowledge and the education of students does not ensure the prosperity or even survival of universities any longer, and equally important are the admission of elite students, the outcome-based evaluation of academic performance, the establishment of alumni network and also fundraising. This article examines how and to what extent this trend of marketization has invaded the order of discourse of Chinese universities. (...) The research methodology combines the paradigms of critical discourse analysis and the tenets of critical genre analysis [Bhatia VK Towards critical genre analysis. In: Bhatia VK, Flowerdew J and Jones RH Advances in Discourse Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 166–177], with particular attention paid to the notion of genre, interdiscursivity and conversationalization. The texts examined include ceremonial speeches, regulatory documents, insiders’ accounts and field notes. Analytical results show that the trend of marketization, in spite of a potential threat for academic integrity, does facilitate the institutional restructuring and transformation of universities in the context of Mainland China. (shrink)

In academic oral genres such as conference presentations, speakers resort to more than words to convey meaning. Research also suggests that persuasion, an important element of the communicative purpose of conference presentations, is frequently achieved through a combination of semiotic modes. Therefore, a skilful orchestration of these modes can be considered key to achieving effective communication in this genre. However, our understanding of persuasion has often focused on specific elements of the message considered in isolation and mainly from the linguistic (...) perspective. Relatively little attention has been paid to the overall persuasive effect achieved by the complex multimodal ensemble. This study approaches the analysis of persuasive strategies in conference presentations combining multimodal discourse analysis and ethnographic methods. It focuses on a particular attention-getting technique: enactment of characters, or acting the part of a person that is being referred to. Our analysis shows how it is achieved through the orchestration of different modes such as words, intonation, gestures, head movements, gaze and facial expression. (shrink)

This paper proposes a multimodal ethnosemiotic conceptual framework for culturally themed selective Web archiving, taking as a practical example the curation of the London French Special Collection in the UK Web Archive. Its focus on a particular ‘community’ is presented as advantageous in overcoming the sheer scale of data available on the Web; yet, it is argued that these ethnographic boundaries may be flawed if they do not map onto the collective self-perception of the London French. The approach establishes several (...) theoretical meeting points between Pierre Bourdieu’s ethnography and Gunther Kress’s multimodal social semiotics, notably, the foregrounding of practice and the meaning-making potentialities of the everyday; the implications of language and categorisation; the interplay between subject and object; evolving notions of agency, authorship and audience; together with social engagement, and the archive as dynamic process and product. The curation rationale proposed stems from Bourdieu’s three-stage field analysis model, which places a strong emphasis on habitus, considered to be most accurately presented through blogs, yet necessitates its contextualisation within the broader field, through institutional websites, for example, whilst advocating a reflexive awareness of the researcher/curator’s role. This, alongside the Kressian acknowledgement of the inherent multimodality of on-line resources, lends itself convincingly to selection and valuation strategies, whilst the discussion of language, genre, authorship and audience is relevant to the potential cataloguing of Web objects. By conceptualising the culturally themed selective Web-archiving process within the ethnosemiotic framework constructed, concrete recommendations emerge regarding curation, classification and crowd-sourcing. (shrink)

The importance of the gesture and the glance in oral communication face-to-face are undeniable, however, the communication skills of children with Specific Language Impairment has been measured, primarily preferring a description of its language orally or has been considered the verbal and non-verbal in an isolated manner. Given this, the objective of this study was to describe and interpret the use of the word, gesture and glances in narrative discourse in children SLI from a multimodal perspective, that allows to observe (...) not only the use of these resources, but also their integration. With a retelling task with support of visual images, oral productions of six Chilean children between 5 years and 5 years 11 months were analyzed. The findings indicate that children construct narratives from a combination of verbal and non-verbal resources and their number increases when the character’s actions are described. Also, it was possible to account for two instances of multisemiotic meaning construction through an assembly between different elements, in coordination or integration. These results corroborate previous findings that show that these children replace some of their problems with oral language through gestures and looks, which allow them to increase the communicability of their stories. (shrink)

As there are more and more bilingual couples who ran vlogs to share their bilingual and intercultural lives on the internet, this paper seeks to delineate the sources of motivation for these couples to disclose their privacy through vlogging. Based on the sample of selected vlogs, a qualitative analysis has been conducted to obtain the sociolinguistic picture of the bilingual couples’ motivations to attract wider audiences via the internet. The analysis of vlogs, informed by a multimodal theoretical framework, focused on (...) the audiovisual and textual content of vlogs with regard to the subjective representations of films and texts resulting from these couples’ individual stories. The conducted study spotlights vlogging activities of bilingual couples who feel the need to share their intercultural and bilingual experiences on the internet. Our data suggest that bilingual couples vlog to express their hybrid identities by sharing how they cope with challenges and overcome linguistic barriers, as well as find ways to enjoy cross-cultural understanding. The paper explores the linguistic and cultural diversity from a new perspective of private vlogs created and maintained by bilingual couples. It unfolds an account of the less studied online context in which partners of different ethnic backgrounds make their private lives public, and illustrates how bilingual couples generate ideas to filming and sharing online. (shrink)

Motivated by a call for risk discourse research in non-Western settings, this study examines how Vietnamese road safety video advertisements are constructed and interpreted. Following a literature review of risk and gender, the study first sets out socio-semiotic multimodal analysis of video advertisements to detail how concepts of risk and gender are constructed. Afterwards, I take an ethnographic-based approach in a series of interviews with professional Vietnamese women to gain insights into these concepts. Findings of the study reveal the expected (...) female roles as wives and mothers in Vietnamese advertising as interpreted by Vietnamese women. The study contributes to an understanding of risk in this Asian setting and opens up the potential for a critical, interpretive approach to risk discourses that are grounded in lived experiences. (shrink)

Using a multimodal discursive approach, this study explores how the COVID-19 pandemic is constructed and used in press reportage to mobilize intergroup relations and national identities. We examine how press reporting about the development of COVID-19 in Sweden is cast as a matter of nationalism and national stereotyping in the Finnish press. The data consist of 183 images with accompanying headlines and captions published in two Finnish national newspapers between January 1 and August 31, 2020. We found three multimodal rhetorical (...) strategies of stereotyping: moralizing, demonizing, and nationalizing. These strategies construct discourses of arrogant, immoral, and dangerous Swedes sourcing from national stereotypes. The study contributes to current knowledge about the work on national stereotypes by illustrating how they are used in media discourse to achieve certain rhetorical ends, such as to persuade, mitigate, or justify intergroup relations. Furthermore, the study offers insight into the multimodal constructions and functions of stereotypes. (shrink)

Previous studies on legitimation, multimodality and political discourse by researchers, such as Van Leeuwen, Van Dijk and Mackay, have suggested different but supplementary methods of legitimation analysis by providing a number of analytical frameworks. Multimodal legitimation research, however, seems to be in need of a better conflation of the theoretical backgrounds of disciplines, such as narratology. This article focuses on the multimodal discourse of three political advertisements of the political party New Democracy, filmed for the needs of the Greek legislative (...) election of January 2015. What is investigated is the multimodal means by which New Democracy’s president, and Prime Minister at the time, Antonis Samaras attempted to legitimise his candidacy. In this article, I use the six-layer framework proposed by Mackay for multimodal legitimation analyses and I argue that multimodal legitimation research can benefit and get enhanced from the use of narratology and its analytical categories, such as perspective. (shrink)

The question of the trait that would distinguish human beings from the rest of the animals has kept humanity awake for centuries. Their ability to express themselves through words, their use of reason, their self-awareness of their finiteness or their capacity to produce and appreciate the art have been some of the faculties that, over the centuries, have come to give humanity a justification for its position in the world. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence, many of these attributes came (...) to be questioned thanks to the ability of non-biological entities to produce, among other performances, artistic and literary works. In this article we will revisit some of the topics that have allowed us to delineate the limits of what is human and, in the light of the latest technological advances, to question the link that humanity, technology and artistic creation have with each other today. (shrink)

This article examines contributions from members of the public featured in British television news coverage of the 2005 London bombings. Specifically, it explores how images captured by ordinary people on their mobile devices were used in the live news reportage of 7/7 and, given the current salience of commemorative journalism, how these were used in the tragedy’s first year anniversary coverage. The analysis reveals broadcasters’ selection of uniform, repetitive and ‘sanitized’ mobile media footage, as well as a tendency towards non-attribution. (...) This article contributes to the scant body of discourse analytic research into ‘participatory journalism’ practices, particularly their interaction with ‘traditional’ forms of journalism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Riding on the rising concern of public health and the growing neoliberal self-care agenda, the food market has witnessed a surge in ‘healthy’ food despite the criticism of this food does not help consumers eat more healthily. A growing interest in Critical Discourse Studies is how food marketers colonise not only the food discourse but also the broader ideas and values such as health, politics, and environment. Contributing to this growing body of research, we look at one of the (...) fastest-growing food trends, ‘functional drinks’, which claim to target physiological and psychological processes in the body, so that consumers can manage their health and performance. Company websites rely on forms of infographics to communicate how the products work. Adopting the notion of ‘integrated design’ from multimodal CDS, we show how these infographics, drawing on their affordances, are particularly useful in symbolising classifications and causalities which could not be accounted for in running texts. The paper argues that this is a way health and science converge with a neoliberal discourse of self-management and enterprise culture. Given the increased use of forms of integrated design in communication, more critical discursive work is needed in this area. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to determine the representation of persons with disabilities in the print media advertisements of Costa Rica during the period 2014-2016. In the first place, we analyze the advertisements on disability that have appeared in the three most widely circulated newspapers in Costa Rica, following the Fairclough’s budgets about the representation of social actors, inclusion and exclusion strategies, legitimization and explanation that are made of the PCD in the ads. We determine the actions performed by (...) the PDC in the analyzed texts, the relationships with other people that appear in the announcements. Finally, from a multimodal perspective of Kress and Van Leeuwen, through the visual analysis and its relation with the linguistic one, we analyzed the congruent or incongruent images that are promoted in the advertising discourse. It is concluded that there is an invisibility of this population; since the number of ads on disability is less than 0.0015% and that the speech reproduces stigmas and stereotypes from a social- assistance perspective of the PCD, even though it is the State the main advertiser of the ads. (shrink)

In critical discourse analysis, we have learned much about the nature of the marketized language that now dominates public institutions such as universities, playing a role in changing their identities. But less is known about the processes whereby this language enters the everyday practices of these institutions through documents that are used to manage teaching and research. What is the role of language in the shift to the way these activities are internally organized, managed, run and evaluated in terms of (...) productivity and market-based principles? In this paper we analyse a chain of documents taken from a wider corpus of management documents in Swedish universities to show how this language recontextualizes the practices of teaching and research. Our focus is on the important role played by lists, bullet points and tables and how these are central to decoupling language from work processes and so legitimizing this marketized discourse. The affordances of these multimodal structures allow complex processes and social relations to be abstracted, fragmented and treated as things. They are also important in allowing documents to form a complex self-referential information infrastructure. (shrink)

This study investigates the influences of action research on primary school English instruction from five dimensions in the classroom, viz., types of questions, language errors, gestures, facial expressions, and interpersonal distance. Four English teachers’ 9 real classroom teaching videos before and after action research are collected and annotated by using ELAN software. The results show that primary school English teachers in Chinese rural areas prefer closed questions to open questions; They make some language errors; Deictic gestures are the most common (...) gestures used, while metaphoric gestures, beat gestures and iconic gestures are rare; Teachers have the same preference for three types of facial expressions, and teachers’ serious expressions accounts for most of the time; They seldom keep an intimate distance or personal distance from their students. Second, Action research is effective to motivate teachers in rural areas, who make great progress in all five dimensions after AR: more open questions are asked; pragmatic errors and grammatical errors are reduced; deictic gestures increase; apathetic decrease, and more intimate distance is exhibited in the interpersonal distance dimension. Third, teacher’s English teaching competence is partly transferrable to her future professional development, and this is also the long-lasting effect of AR. (shrink)

This article examines intertextuality in digital humour through a combination of tools from pragmatics and decoloniality. The study draws on a dataset of Spanish image macros that intertwine highbrow and lowbrow intertextual references. The analysis is framed by key theoretical concepts at the discursive and hierarchical levels. Specifically, three domains of the colonial matrix of power (knowledge, humanity and governance) are used as analytical categories to identify specific intertextual strategies and hierarchies present in the data. The visual and verbal components (...) of the items are analysed through critical discourse analysis with attention to their salient signs. The use of the colonial matrix of power as an analytical tool for identifying hierarchies in intertextual references stands out as a methodological application with the potential to be further replicated in discourse analysis. (shrink)

Taking the example of two 1960s popular spy films this paper explores how social semiotics can make a contribution to the analysis of film music. Followingother scholars who have sought to create inventories of sound meanings to help us break down the way that music communicates, this paper explores how wecan draw on the principles of Hallidayan functional grammar to present an inventory of meaning potentials in sound. This provides one useful way to describe thesemiotic resources available to composers to (...) allow them to communicate quite specific ideas, attitudes and identities through combinations of different sounds and sound qualities, by presenting them as systems of meaning rather than as lists of connotations. Here we apply this to the different uses of music and sound in Dr No and The Ipcress Files which allows us to show how we can reveal different ideologies of spying. (shrink)

In this article, we investigate the use of social media in contemporary family interaction from a linguistic ethnographic perspective. Inspired by Auer’s work on code-switching in conversation, we study how family members choose and sometimes alternate between digitally mediated and face-to-face modes of communication in various family settings. Based on ethnographic observations, the participants’ metapragmatic reflections, and their interactional orientations to mode choices, we show how such choices serve social and metapragmatic functions in the interaction between family members who are (...) present in the same house or even in the same room. Accordingly, we argue in favor of situating peoples’ polymedia repertoires in a broader framework of communicative repertoires. (shrink)

Resumen Los textos televisivos interpretan y analizan la realidad circundante e influyen en la visión que la audiencia tiene del mundo. Es más, los programas cómicos basados en la burla y el sarcasmo hacia grupos étnicos minoritarios refuerzan estereotipos negativos y promueven la discriminación cultural. En este artículo se estudia el humor étnico en La paisana Jacinta. Esta serie peruana ha sido acusada de racista por diversas personas y grupos, entre ellos, la excongresista indígena Hilaria Supa, LUNDU y CHIRAPAQ. Primero, (...) se analizan las estrategias pragmático-lingüísticas empleadas en la construcción del humor étnico en una selección de diálogos y monólogos de Jacinta, el personaje principal de la serie. Para ello, se utiliza la Teoría General del Humor Verbal. Asimismo, dado que todo texto es multimodal, se tiene también en cuenta cómo imágenes, gestos, y elementos musicales y prosódicos en la serie contribuyen en la producción de la comicidad. Finalmente, a partir de estos resultados, se examina el contenido cómico del programa desde una perspectiva crítica para determinar si este es discriminatorio. (shrink)

The semiotic world that we inhabit is fast changing in terms of the resources that are used and the practices in which many engage. Yet the institutional norms governing highly consequential academic texts – students’ texts assessed as part of their disciplinary-based activity and scholars’ papers submitted for publication – lack engagement with this array of resources and, epistemologically, continue to drive a monologic stance towards academic meaning making. The aim of this article is to argue for a reconfiguring of (...) the textual goal of academic writing, through one simple yet transformative tool, that of juxtaposition. Textual juxtaposition is illustrated in this article, and its intellectual and ideological value discussed, drawing on Bakhtin’s emphasis on dialogue, using several examples from published academic texts. The relevance to scholarly and student writing is explored. (shrink)

Deepfakes, an algorithm that transposes the face of one person onto the face of another person in images and film, is a digital technology that may fundamentally alter our belief in visual modality and thus presents alarming consequences for an image-centric culture. Not only are these face-translations now so advanced that it is virtually impossible for people to tell that they are fake – this technology is also becoming accessible to laypersons who, with little or no computer skills, can use (...) them for all kinds of purposes, including criminal intentions like revenge porn and identity theft. It is therefore timely and crucial to explore the semiotic potential of deepfakes. This paper presents a semiotic technology perspective, i.e., the study of technology for meaning- making that is an emergent field in social semiotics, to report on findings from an ongoing study of how deepfake software is designed and used as a semiotic resource in erotic and political contexts. The paper advances the argument that the software is able to appropriate all signifiers of the face and their cultural history. Consequently, the semiotic operations of this technology prepare the ground for the problematic perspectives of synthetic facial imagery. On this basis, the paper calls for a critical awareness of taking visual representations of current events at face value and considers how deepfake technology is embedded in unsound sharing practices of visual artefacts that tamper with the rich meaning potential of the face. (shrink)

This paper will use the theoretical concepts of ‘intertextuality’, ‘interdiscursivity’ and ‘resemiotization’ to analyse four media texts on South African president, Jacob Zuma. The aims of the paper are, first, to analyse the role that intertextual references play in the construction of the identity of public figures. Second, the paper investigates the semiotic affordances of the visual and linguistic mode by tracing how previous discourses and texts about Jacob Zuma move across discursive spaces and modes. The findings suggest that reference (...) to previous discourses play a fundamental role in the way in which Jacob Zuma is constructed. More specifically, resemiotization from the verbal to the visual mode seems to serve as a way to bring multiple discourses into a text without necessarily articulating these discourses linguistically. These findings are discussed within the broader framework of critical discourse analysis. (shrink)