Multimodal Epistemologies

This volume develops a new multimodal semiotic approach to the study of communication, examining how multimodal discourse is construed transmedially and interculturally and how new technologies and cultural stances inform communicative contexts across the world. It contributes to current theoretical debates in the disciplines of semiotics, linguistics, multimodality, and pragmatics, as well as those aspects of pedagogy and film studies that engage with the notions of text and narrative by addressing questions such as: How do we study multimedia communication? How do we incorporate the impact of new media technologies into the study of Linguistics and Semiotics? How do we construe culture in modern communication? How useful are the current multidisciplinary approaches to multimodal communication?Through the analysis of specific case studies that are developed within diverse academic disciplines and which draw on a range of theoretical frameworks, the goal of this book is to provide a basis for an overarching framework that can be applied by scholars and students with different academic and cultural backgrounds.

'This volume enriches the approaches and analytical methods in the study of multimodality and multimodal communication by presenting studies with both practical analysis and theoretical considerations...with theoretical and methodological innovations, this edited volume offers its reader a range of recent studies in multimodal discourses of diverse kinds. These studies renew our knowledge, or in the editors’ term, “epistemologies” in multimodality and the rules played by multimodality in contemporary communication.' - Kunkun Zhang, Macquarie University, The LINGUIST List

Arianna Maiorani is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics in the Department of English and Drama, Loughborough University, UK. She holds a PhD in Cultural Sciences and has published extensively in the fields of SFL analysis of literature and Multimodality, with a specific focus of films and Internet as cultural phenomena.Christine Christie is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics in the Department of English and Drama, Loughborough University, UK. She holds a PhD in Linguistics and has extensively published on gender and language, pragmatics, and politeness theory.