Semiotic Margins

Meaning in Multimodalities

Shoshana Dreyfus, Susan Hood, Maree Stenglin

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781441192875
• eBook ISBN: 9781441170163
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistic Semantics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Semiotic Margins analyses the meaning making potential of not only language, but modalities like laughter, music, colour, and architectural spaces. By examining resources often positioned on the side-line of mainstream semiotic accounts, this study raises the question of what counts as part of language and communication and why. Beginning with the more established nonverbal resources of communication, four major themes of modalities of meaning are covered. The investigation of music and space looks at how semiotic systems in classical music interact. Using children's books, the relationship between images and verbal meaning is then explored, presenting implications for student literacy as well as a methodology for supporting children excluded from mainstream literary practices. Finally new approaches to transcribing representations in screen-based technologies are presented through an examination of television advertisements. Semiotic Margins will appeal to linguists and semioticians wishing to pursue research in systemic functional linguistics and multimodal discourse analysis.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: Beyond Paralinguistics
• Part Two: Evolving Accounts of Space and Music
• Part Three: Intermodality between the Visual, Verbal and Aural
• Part Four: Imaging Representations of Meaning
• Index