This collection explores the links between multimodality and multilingualism, charting the interplay between languages, channels and forms of communication in multilingual written texts from historical manuscripts through to the new media of today and the non-verbal associations they evoke. The volume argues that features of written texts such as graphics, layout, boundary marking and typography are inseparable from verbal content. Taken together, the chapters adopt a systematic historical perspective to investigate this interplay over time and highlight the ways in which the two disciplines might further inform one another in the future as new technologies emerge. The first half of the volume considers texts where semiotic resources are the sites of modes, where multiple linguistic codes interact on the page and generate extralinguistic associations through visual features and spatial organizaisation. The second half of the book looks at texts where this interface occurs not in the text but rather in the cultural practices involved in social materiality and text transmission. Enhancing our understandings of multimodal resources in both historical and contemporary communication, this book will be of interest to scholars in multimodality, multilingualism, historical communication, discourse analysis and cultural studies. Chapters 1, 4, and 5 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. Chapters 1 & 4 have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license, with Chapter 5 being made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

This edited book examines the multilingual culture of medieval England, exploring its impact on the development of English and its textual manifestations from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The book offers overviews of the state of the art of research and case studies on this subject in (sub)disciplines of linguistics including historical linguistics, onomastics, lexicology and lexicography, sociolinguistics, code-switching and language contact, and also includes contributions from literary and socio-cultural studies, material culture, and palaeography. The authors focus on the variety of languages in use in medieval Britain, including English, Old Norse, Norn, Dutch, Welsh, French, and Latin, making the argument that understanding the impact of medieval multilingualism on the development of English requires multidisiplinarity and the bringing together of different frameworks in linguistics and cultural studies to achieve more nuanced answers. This book will be of interest to academics and students of historical linguistics and medieval textual culture.

Written by a team of global scholars, this is the first Handbook covering the rapidly growing field of historical orthography. Comprehensive yet accessible, it is essential reading for academic researchers and students in the field, and in related areas such as morphology, syntax, historical linguistics, linguistic typology and sociolinguistics.

This edited volume brings together two largely separate fields – organization studies and multimodal social semiotics – to develop an integrated research agenda for the novel interdisciplinary field of ‘organizational semiotics’. Organizations, whether for profit, non-profit, or governmental, dominate much of everyday life, and multimodal communication is not only an output of organizations, but is also constitutive of them. This volume argues in particular for the importance of organization studies for social semioticians – not just as a site of application, but also as a critical contemporary context that requires novel and expanded methods of analysis and critique, and new practices of partnership. The volume addresses a range of institutions and sectors, from civil to retail to medical, from corporations to universities, and reveals how a deep engagement with their meaning-making practices produces insights not just about communication but also about the broader contemporary cultural context in which organizations play such a significant role. Fundamentally, it reveals that the rich analytical and theoretical resources of multimodal perspectives on organizations studies can – and should – make a fundamental contribution to our understanding of organizations in social life. This volume is relevant to social semioticians and organizational researchers as well as to practitioners and decision-makers in organizations.

This book explores the interplay between various semiotic modes in multimodal texts and the ways in which they are employed to express cultural translation, seeking to expand prevailing views of translation and adaptation in light of everchanging social realities. Drawing on work from multimodal discourse studies, translation studies and adaptation studies, Kohn and Weissbrod shed a light on the increasing prominence of the visual in multimodal texts in the act of translation in a broad sense, and specifically, in conveying cultural translation, broadly understood as the processes and experiences which communities and individuals undergo in the face of social and cultural upheavals which require them to become acquainted with new signs, uniquely encoded across different contexts. Each example showcases individual sociocultural domains while also engaging in the active role of the audience and the respective spaces these works inhabit. The book brings together work from translation and adaptation studies and multimodality and opens up avenues for new research, making it of interest to scholars in these disciplines as well as fields such as media studies, migration studies and cultural studies.

This collection brings together social semiotic, ethnographic, and conversation analytic approaches to multimodality in global studies of shopping, drawing on the rich diversity of the latest multimodal methods to critically reflect on shopping as a cornerstone of contemporary social life. The volume explores shopping as an area of study in its own right, with the buying and selling of goods and services a fundamental part of the social and cultural life of human communities for centuries. The book looks at both online and offline shopping, examining it as both everyday multi-sensorial practice and its translation into the interactive text and imagery that comprise the online shopping experience, from London street markets to Japanese grocery shops to Danish supermarkets to worldwide online shopping sites. Highlighting the diversity of modern multimodal approaches through contributions from established scholars, the book critically surveys both the challenges and opportunities in the embodied interactions between buyers and sellers and how these points of connection have been translated and will continue to transform in the age of algorithms and emergent technologies. This book will appeal to students and scholars interested in multimodality, multimodal conversation analysis, social semiotics, social interaction, and retail studies.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of TED talks as a digital-multimodal video genre, exploring the ways in which myriad rhetorical, structural, digital, and multimodal resources are used to communicate scientific knowledge to lay audiences. Drawing on insights from genre analysis, the systemic functional approach to multimodal discourse analysis, and the social semiotic approach to multimodality, the volume examines the communicative contexts in which TED talks are constructed, their rhetorical structure, the deployment of multimodal tools, and diachronic developments. The book reflects on the ways in which TED talks are uniquely positioned to offer new insights into how experts disseminate scientific knowledge for non-specialist audiences, constructed as they are within a community defined by a fluidity and diversity of audiences and speakers. The volume offers strategies for not only making the process of disseminating specialized knowledge more engaging and accessible but also expanding their own semiotic and communicative repertoires, increasingly crucial in our digitally driven era. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of English for Specific Purposes, multimodality, discourse analysis, and digital communication.

This volume brings together perspectives from multimodal stylistics and adaptation studies for a unified theoretical analysis of adaptations of the work of Alice Munro, demonstrating the affordances of the approach in furthering interdisciplinary research at the intersection of these fields The book considers films and television programmes as complex multimodal stylistic systems in and of themselves in order to pave the way for a clearer understanding of screen adaptations as expressions of modal, medial, and aesthetic change. In focusing on Munro, Francesconi draws attention to a writer whose body of work has been adapted widely across television and film for an international market over several decades, offering a diachronic overview and insights into the confluence of socio-cultural contexts, audiences, and dynamics of production and distribution across adaptations. The volume complements this perspective with a microanalysis of the adaptations themselves, exploring the varied creative use of audio-visual dimensions, including sound, light, and movement. The book seeks to overcome simplified fidelity-based understandings of screen adaptations more broadly, showcasing creative multi-layered approaches to a creator’s oeuvre to effect true transformation across media and modes. The volume will be of interest to scholars in multimodality, adaptation studies, film studies, and comparative literature.

This book helps readers to understand communication and society in contemporary China through systematic analysis of multimodal discourse at the national, institutional and individual levels. China has undergone profound changes during the past decade or so. Politically, the Chinese government has been more proactive in domestic governance and foreign policies, as manifested in the Chinese Dream campaign and the national image publicity films respectively. Hand in hand with the socio-political change is the rapid development of new media, which has been changing how corporates do business, how institutions brand their images, as well as how individuals construct their identities and social relations. These changes have brought about significant changes to the discursive practices at the national, institutional and individual levels, characterized by the extensive use of multimodal resources and distinct promotional purposes. Feng systematically investigates and discusses the new discursive features in relation to relevant socio-cultural contexts. The analysis and discussion provide researchers with a social semiotic perspective on various aspects of communicative and social changes in contemporary China. The book also contributes to the growing field of multimodality by developing a set of cross-disciplinary analytical frameworks to deal with complex discourse forms in print media, moving images, and new media. The research findings provide a unique Chinese perspective on a broad spectrum of issues such as discursive governance, nation branding, university marketization, and identity performance. The book is relevant not only to discourse analysis and multimodality, but also to other disciplines which will benefit from a systematic understanding of Chinese discourse, such as cultural studies, communication studies and area/China studies.

This innovative volume provides a new analytic framework for understanding how meaning-making resources are deployed in images designed for knowledge building in school science. The framework enables analyses of science images from the perspectives of both their complexity and recognizability. Complexity deals with the technical and abstract knowledge of school science (technicality), evaluative dispositions in relation to that knowledge (iconization) and the condensation of the technical and dispositional meanings as ‘synoptic eyefuls’ in discipline-specific infographics (aggregation). Recognizability concerns the relationship between the appearance of phenomena in reality and the reconfiguration of this reality in images (congruence), the perceptibility or discernibility of the features and contexts of phenomena in images (explicitness), and how images engage their viewers (affiliation). The framework is illustrated by more than 100 images in colour in the e-book and black and white in the paper version and will inform research into multimodal literacy pedagogy that incorporates an understanding of the role of images in the teaching and learning of school science. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in multimodality, semiotics, literacy education and science education.