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Although ‘voice’ is a contested concept used in many different ways, it is often used to indicate degrees of authorial agency and, as such, is useful for exploring interest and design in artwork and three dimensional artefacts. This paper investigates the semiotic signifiers of voice in artwork, arguing that the notion of materiality is crucial for understanding voice in designed three dimensional artefacts. The methodological approach is multimodal social semiotics where meaning is seen to be made through the selection and configuration of modes in texts and through the interest of the sign-maker in a particular context. This position paper focuses on authorial engagement as realized through semiotic choices, and explores the relationship between creativity and constraints in sign-making. It also investigates ways in which voice is constructed intertextually through citation in artwork. It argues that in designed artefacts, citation takes the form of explicit or implicit negotiation with authoritative conventions, and it is also realised through sensory and connotative provenance. The overall aim is to find apt semiotic terms to talk about voice across modes, genres and domains. Identifying these semiotic tools and signifiers of voice may be useful in a number of domains, including the pedagogical where voice often instantiates the negotiation between students’ lifeworlds and the new ideas, contexts and genres they encounter.

The primary objective of this paper is to discuss humorous political cartoons contingent on pictorial and textual components, with the heuristic apparatus provided by Fauconnier and Turner’s (2002, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books) conceptual blending theory . Blending is discussed in reference to three approaches to humour known in topical literature, viz. bisociation (Koestler, 1964. The Act of Creation. London: Hutchinson), the incongruity-resolution model (Suls, 1972, A two-stage model for the appreciation of jokes and cartoons: An information processing analysis. In: The Psychology of Humor, J. Goldstein and P. McGhee (Eds.), 81–100. New York: Academic Press; 1983, Cognitive processes in humour appreciation. In: Handbook of Humour Research, Vol. 1, P. McGhee and J. Goldstein (Eds.), 39–57. New York: Springer), and relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1995, Relevance Theory: Communication and Cognition. 2nd. Blackwell: Oxford; Yus, 2003, Humour and the search for relevance. Journal of Pragmatics, 35(9):1295–1331; 2016, Humour and Relevance. Amsterdam: John Benjamins). Here, a corpus of 45 multimodal cartoons on the West is examined. A detailed discussion of examples aims to testify to the widespread and multifarious applicability of the incongruity-relevance-blending approach to the analysis of humorous cartoons. Additionally, an attempt is made to explain the difference between humorous and non-humorous blends.

In many countries around the world, the focus of education has seen a distinct shift from knowledge and skills equipping to the cultivation of values, attitudes and even affect. This study focuses on the verbal and visual representations of affect and attitude in a set of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks published in China. By analyzing the verbal and visual attitudinal meanings through the analytic lenses of appraisal theory and visual grammar respectively, the paper shows how verbal and visual resources with positive appraisal meanings are employed to foster positive affect and attitudes toward English language learning, China, and foreign cultures in the textbooks. While these verbal and visual resources echo generally concordant attitudinal meanings, some significant dissonances were also detected. For instance, tensions seem to exist between strengthening local loyalties to China while promoting a global outlook, raising standards of English language among Chinese students by appealing to Anglo-centric models of proficiency, and raising awareness of foreign cultures by invoking familiar local customs and practices. These findings hold important implications for language educators, curriculum designers and educational researchers working in the field of multimodality.

The account of signs, signification and meaning set out by the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce around the beginning of the twentieth century is a foundation stone of modern semiotics. In Peirce’s conception, semiotics concerned the process of signification at its most general and was intrinsically multimodal. It is then logical that contemporary multimodal research should engage with the Peircean view of semiotics. This in turn makes it particularly important that better understandings of the potential interconnections between Peircean semiotics and multimodality be achieved. Until now, however, such interconnections have been limited not only with respect to what has been drawn from Peirce’s account but also with respect to the areas of multimodality concerned. To deepen and broaden communication among approaches to multimodality and between those approaches and Peircean semiotics, this article sets out a reading of Peirce’s ‘mature’ 1903 position on semiotics aimed specifically at improving the utility of the account for multimodal analysis. The article argues that a lack of methodological precision within semiotics has led to relatively impoverished and empirically unreliable analyses. A new synthesis between Peirce’s account and multimodality is proposed as a stronger metatheoretical framework both for addressing multimodality and for drawing more from Peirce.