Volume 13, Issue 2

This study employs social semiotics as a multimodal analytical framework to explore various communication modes employed in Bob Marley’s 1974 “Natty Dread” album to describe the Rastaman. The album’s cover design, including images, font style, and colours, carry significant meanings that contribute to the representation of the Rasta identity. Marley’s lexical choices, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives and noun phrases also play a crucial role in presenting the Rasta identity. Additionally, Marley utilises various literary devices such as repetition, metaphor, allusion, and imagery to vividly describe the Rastaman. The song titles and their arrangement on the album form a cohesive narrative depicting the Rastaman’s life. In essence, the “Natty Dread” album portrays the Rastaman as a humble individual connected to the streets. The Rastaman’s physical appearance is distinguished by his distinctive dreadlocks. His lifestyle embraces simplicity, a deep connection with nature, the pursuit of freedom and happiness, love, peace, unity, and rebellion against the oppressive establishment. Material possessions hold little importance for the Rastaman as he considers his spiritual devotion to Jah (God) and his commitment to his community paramount. Furthermore, an inseparable part of the Rastaman’s culture is his use of marijuana and music, particularly reggae, which serves as a powerful tool with which he combats social injustices and inequalities in the world.

Expanding on classic theories of stancetaking and theorizing digital activism as nexus analysis, I examine how Omani Arab citizens used discourse and images to canalize a failed food boycott campaign on Twitter (X) into a united negative stance against alleged corruption. I highlight the role of multimodality, impoliteness, indirectness, intertextual references, participation framework and Arabic cultural practices in creating a multi-layered, accreted stance with manifold implicit functions (e.g., defining Omani identity, lamenting and signalling dissent). I argue for the need to widen the scope and level of analysis of stance acts to include interplays between texts, emoji, actions and images. I also highlight the role that stance can perform in expressing dissent and managing cultural face in the understudied Arabic context. I, therefore, demonstrate the multidimensionality of stance acts made visible by social media affordances and user creativity.

The following study integrates the concept of image schema with the idea of gestural metaphorical scenario, showing how image schematic properties of gestures feed into a pragmatically-oriented gestural metaphorical scenario distributed across different speakers. The study shows that a gestural metaphorical scenario of swearing is based on several image schemas: the cognitively primary object image schema, the source-path-goal image schema, showing the trajectory of movement of an imaginary object, and the blockage image schema, enacting the meaning of not being willing to accept an imaginary object into the speaker’s personal space, effectively leading to blocking its way. The proposed integration also lends more credence to the idea of a multilevel metaphor, where a single metaphor is treated as consisting of various elements at different levels of schematicity. Apart from that, the study shows that the straight image schema, visible in pointing gestures, is a scenario-independent conceptual element surfacing when people use gestures while swearing, projecting a way out of the speaker’s personal space.

Art-based interventions are increasingly employed in workplace settings for the purposes of organizational training and development. In this article, we examine the implementation of a workshop where hand drumming is used in two client organizations. Through the detailed analysis of the trainers’ actions, the article shows how the trainers use the combination of verbal and embodied means in order to instruct and encourage participation in joint drumming. In particular, the article demonstrates how the trainers’ instructive practice change across the instructional phases of the workshop and form a trajectory from pre-planned rhythm patterns to free collective improvisation in the pre-designed service product.

This article presents a multimodal discourse analysis of a discursive event involving three kindergarten children engaged in informal talk while writing and drawing in a classroom setting. My focus was to identify semiotic elements that indicated the children’s subjectivity as constituted in discourse. I thus characterize the focal students’ subjectivity not as an internal, pre-existing phenomenon that is brought to discourse, but, rather, as manifest in and realized as a discursive entity. From this perspective, subjectivity is thus understood as the possibility of becoming a subject of discourse: as a process of coming to create, participate in, and become affected by the unfolding discourse. Drawing upon theories of discourse developed by Émile Benveniste and Jacques Lacan, I mapped uses of the pronouns “I” and “you” as spoken signifiers that came into relation with discursive objects in the process of the multimodal constitution of subjectivity in discourse. This analysis adds to the conceptual development of the processes and significance of subjectivity in children’s multimodal discourse, as well as methodological approaches that suggest how multimodal discourse analysis can more explicitly incorporate subjectivity.

Drawing on interviews with, and images from, a selection of female participants, we develop the notion of semiotic assemblages to examine tattoos as mobile semiotic material for embodied meaning-making, with multi-located trajectories linking the tattooed bodies to different spatial networks. In turn, we draw on the social semiotic approach to multimodality by looking at assemblages of tattoos as vibrant material, pregnant with  thing-power which, while re-making the bodies of individual tattoo owners, simultaneously shapes and semiotically remediates physical and affective (e.g. emotional and memorial) objects and feelings. We illustrate how corporeal materials and activities, and the incorporeal conceptual, perceptual and affective senses and feelings are remediated across boundaries of language, geography, semiotic modes, media, and chains of mediation to make meaning. We end with a suggestion that multimodal analysis of semiotic assemblages needs to take a multiscalar approach to account for mobilities, movements and flow, and the continuities and disconnections in forms and meanings the dynamics of the connectedness produce across different scales.

In the last few years, the European Union (EU) has been creating a wide range of educational resources for teachers and students to encourage discussion in class on sensitive issues such as environmental protection and sustainability. Following the tradition of multimodal discourse analysis and research on ecolinguistics, this study aims to analyse the webpage “Environment, climate and energy”, from the EU website Learning Corner , focussing on a sample of informative and didactic resources aimed at explaining the institution’s environmental policies to younger generations. In particular, the analysis will try to detect the main verbal and visual discursive strategies employed by the EU in order to communicate the institutional discourse on environmental protection to the young and develop eco-friendly consciousness. Furthermore, the research will also take into account the intersemiotic relation of the collected data and see whether the EU employs any positive discursive features as alternatives to the mainstream environment discourses to promote sustainability and sensitize young citizens to it.

This research presents a multimodal translation analysis of 20 online advertisements (Ads) for Careem App from Arabic into English. It tries to examine what effects the multimodal elements have on the translation of these Ads; this can be done by shedding light on the similarities and differences of the verbal and visual contents on the one hand, and the consequent effects in rendering from Arabic into English, on the other. The analysis has shown that some mismatching was done by the translator in neglecting the message of the Ads by changing the linguistic content, without taking into consideration the relationship between the textual and visual contents. Examples of mismatching idioms, expressions, and collocations related to the Iraqi culture were found. Also, some Ads were identical in their visual elements, but the verbal content of the translated ones failed to convey the meaning of the source Ads due to cultural differences. The study has also found that the textual-visual relationship is not realized in most of the translated Ads on the word, and above word level. This, in turn, has a direct influence on the textual level; and has consequently led to instances of mismatching in rendering the whole meaning of the target message.

This article explores some issues related to the trauma of slavery, colonialism and identity-formation processes through a multimodal analysis, which is particularly useful in studying the manifold meanings and relationships emerging from the forms of cultural and social representation such as visual art. A series of images, chosen within Ellen Gallagher’s art exhibition “AXME”, held at Tate Gallery in London, is investigated to deal with the discursive constructions of gendered and racial identities. Employing Kress and van Leeuwen’s model (2021 [1996]. Reading images: The grammar of visual design . London: Routledge), this article attempts to identify the signs related to categories such as gender and race, as well as the persistence of stereotypical representations in our contemporary societies.

This study introduces the concept of “self-authorized commemorative practices” to the analysis of semiotic landscapes. It aims to draw attention to commemorative practices by which individuals assert their presence within the semiotic landscape, beyond the influence of powerful authorities that typically determine the visible commemorative aspects of public space. The multimodal practices employed include the use of language, images and artefacts, and their emplacement in the semiotic landscapes. The study is based on two complete photographic inventories of all signage in public space in a rural community in northwest Germany, taken over a ten-year period, in addition to more than twenty years of participant observation. The findings reveal layers of self-authorized commemorative practices, often concealed in plain sight but discernible to the trained eye, interwoven with the local narratives associated with the semiotic landscape. Individuals, through their own means, leave lasting marks that commemorate their existence, achievements, deceased loved ones, or social traditions. These self-authorized practices contribute to the rich tapestry of the semiotic landscape, challenging and expanding our understanding of commemoration beyond the influence of traditional authorities.