Multimodality and Cognitive Linguistics

The aim of this volume is to advance our theoretical and empirical understanding of the relationship between Multimodality and Cognitive Linguistics. The innovative nature of the volume in relation to those existing in the field lies in the fact that it brings together contributions from three of the main approaches dealing with Multimodality – Cognitive Linguistics and multimodal metaphors (Forceville & Urios Aparisi, 2009), social semiotics and systemic functional grammar and multimodal interactional analysis (Jewitt, 2009) –highlighting the importance of multimodal resources, and showing the close relationship between this field of study and Cognitive Linguistics applied to a variety of genres –ranging from comics, films, cartoons, picturebooks or visuals in tapestry to name a few. Originally published in Review of Cognitive Linguistics Vol. 11:2 (2013).

Klaus Sachs-Hombach, University of Tübingen:
Multimodality has become one of the buzzwords not only in social semiotics, but also in cognitive linguistics. This trend is based on the insight that the way we communicate is deeply dependent on the various communicative modes we use in combination while trying to make ourselves better understandable.
The volume takes up this topic giving a very informative overview of the ongoing debates within the different disciplines and approaches. It tackles in particular the relations between social semiotics and cognitive linguistics suggesting thus a better interdisciplinary frame for future research. It is very well written, very informative and certainly a milestone on the way to a more unified research on multimodality. I would highly recommend it as a stimulating and illuminative piece of reading.