Volume 6, Issue 2 -

The aim of this study is to investigate city audio guides in Italian and in English from a multimodal perspective, focusing on the use of music. The audio guide genre is here described as a ‘soundscape’ (Van Leeuwen, T. (1999). Speech, Music, Sounds . London: Macmillan.), i.e. a composite semiotic system characterised by speech, music, and sounds. A Corpus of fifty professional city audio guides in Italian and in English has been qualitatively investigated in order to determine how music can be distributed within the audio guide script, whether and how it intertwines with speech, and the effects it may produce on the listener. The results show that music may be used to serve several purposes, and highlight in particular the roles played by music when this is strictly relevant to the narration. Key differences in the use of music between audio guides in Italian and in English were identified and on the basis of these differences translation issues and implications for professionals in the field are addressed by listing a series of aspects that could be taken into account when producing English versions of Italian audio guides.

Building on multimodal (inter)action analysis as a theoretical and methodological framework, this article introduces and develops the theoretical/methodological tool called primary agency. Taking the mediated action as a unit of analysis, agency can be analysed as a feature of action. However, there is a lack of empirical approaches for the study of agency, and an overemphasis on language as the most important site for identifying agentive action. I develop primary agency through an analysis of three co-produced higher-level actions from a research project into high school tutoring. These are the higher-level actions of conducting research, tutoring and reading a text. Applying co-production and the modal density foreground/background continuum I explore how the researcher, the tutor and the student co-produce these higher-level actions. Through this analysis, I identify the most significant mediational means for each higher-level action, and the social actor with ownership or agency over these mediational means. I define this social actor as the one with primary agency over the co-produced higher-level action. Finally, my analysis outlines the implications of primary agency for co-produced higher-level actions, including the role of the researcher, the attention/awareness participants pay to overarching research projects, and links between primary agency and successful learning.

In this article I explore how pupils are permitted to use different modes and media to express their knowing of a particular subject area, ‘The Middle Ages’. I combine social semiotics with a design-oriented perspective on learning. In both perspectives, multimodality is central. Data comes from a field study of representation, resources and meaning making in two different history classrooms with contrasting learning designs and use of digital technology. In the paper, I show how the different learning- and assessment designs, and text creation practices, affect pupils’ learning. The paper also discuss the need for development of new assessment tools.

In this paper, we describe the conditions under which the manipulation of the verbal and the visual elements or of the visual elements alone in the genre of subvertisements can be considered as an act of objecting or rebutting in an implicit argumentative discussion. We thus consider the cognitive and pragmatic aspects of communication while paying serious attention to the interaction of semiotic modes in order to analyse a number of images produced by anti-consumerist groups such as Adbusters. We identify four different ways in which image-text relations or the visuals alone can cue an incongruity between the message of the original ad and the message of the subvertisement in such a way that the latter functions as an objection or rebuttal of the claim advanced by the original advertisement.