Volume 4, Issue 2 -

This paper examines how gesture, gaze, and objects function in speaker positioning, epistemic stance, and the production of evidence during closing argument in a criminal trial. While most research on closing focuses on descriptions of witnesses’ testimony, this research considers the role of objects as communicative action in the construction and co-construction of persuasive legal oratory. We demonstrate how an attorney can reduce social distance between himself and jurors through the use of impersonal and exclusive pronouns and how speech, gesture, and objects integrate along the aesthetic dimension of communicative practice to emphasize and evaluate testimony. More specifically, we demonstrate how a novel form of evidential action emerges through a recurring flow of gaze, objects, and coding practice.

In the article, Forceville’s (2006, 2008, 2008a, 2009) proposals regarding the identification criteria for multimodal metaphor are discussed in light of the identification procedure that I designed incorporating the theory of the cognitive schema of an object (Pustejovski, 1995), scene (Biederman, 1981), and event (Radvansky & Zacks, 2011) in conjunction with Whittock’s (1990) and Schilperoord’s (2012, unpublished manuscript) ideas of incongruence created through film techniques. This integrated theoretical framework informs three sequential steps that seek (1) to determine whether a commercial is viewed as potentially metaphorical, (2) to identify cognitively prominent projected features of the phenomena involved in the metaphorical context and to justify them, and from this (3) to formulate a metaphor. Each step is illustrated by examples from American, Russian, and Ukrainian TV commercials for alcoholic beverages. The proposed analytical procedure is user-friendly and flexible. It can be reliably employed to identify multimodal potential metaphors displayed in TV commercials and in other multimodal contexts.

This article presents an analysis of Knut Steen’s sculpture of the Norwegian king Olav V from 2006. The sculpture was planned to be placed in the center of Oslo, in front of Oslo City Hall, but was moved to a fjord and mountain landscape in Western Norway, the old trading post Skjerjehamn at the gateway to the Sognefjord. The 7.5 m high massive sculpture of king Olav lifting his arm to a greeting provoked the art commission of the municipality of Oslo. According to the commission, the sculpture was reminicent of art in the Nazi time and of Hitler’s way of greeting. The meaning potential of the sculpture is analysed in three levels, inspired by Jay Lemke’s sandwich model (2000): Level 1, the focus level , the sculpture and its interplay with the local context, Level 2, the level below , the sculpture’s form and material, and Level 3, the level above , the socio-political history of the sculpture which includes its recontextualisation from a busy location in the Norwegian capital to a remote place in a fjord and mountain landscape. The model is also inspired by Michael O’Toole’s rank model for analysing three dimensional art objects (O’Toole, 1994b). The theoretical background for the analysis is social semiotics (Halliday, 1978, 1985; van Leeuwen, 2005; Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001, 2006). We also draw on works of Abousnnouga and Machin (2010a and 2010b, 2011, 2013, 2014) on multimodality and monuments, on works of Barthes (1973, 1997), Duby and Daval (2010), Johnson (1995, 2002), and Kruk (2008, 2010) on monuments and ideology, on Serck-Hanssen (2014) on royal portraits, and on Linell (1998) on theory of recontextualisation.

In the multilingual and multicultural world, what is communicated is not restricted to informative content, or even figurative language but involves aspects of cultural identity; connotations and complex images, to interpret which creative effort and a cross-cultural perspective are required. The phraseological layer of any language is illustrative of such cases. As for the cross-cultural perspective, such factors as openness, reserving strategy, and recognition of paradox are decisive along with shared cultural codes, awareness of the differences between traditions, and motivation to know them. Moreover, as the cognitive and stylistic analysis of such linguistic data in English and Armenian shows, the cross-cultural perspective not only highlights the phenomena in the shared semiotic space but also enables reflection on one’s own background and identity. In particular, it becomes obvious that the evaluative elements arising from the complex (and sometimes paradoxical) associations between extensive conceptual domains resound with a new force, or could be succinctly explained when viewed against another language and/or medium. The association-based installations presented in the paper as visualizations of the states “Between Thought and Image” are meant to suggest that too The materials used for the collages/installations are natural stones, glass beads, glass, wood, obsidian, seashells, ornamental pieces, threads. .

Film titles are distinctive paratextual artefacts that while supporting and normally prefiguring a film or television series, orchestrate unique modes of address into an expression of identity. These multimodal texts have a bifurcate function. First they establish the film’s title and list the primary creative and management team behind the production. In addition, they can also become unique expressions that interpret the ethos of a film. As such they increasingly stand as appreciable design works in their own right. This article considers the design process and eventual form of a 45-second title sequence developed for the six-part television drama series When We Go to War (2015). In so doing it discusses the work as a multimodal artefact and unpacks the creative relationships between elements and ideas that were interwoven into its fabric.