Visual And Multimodal Communication

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that visual information plays an ever greater role in modern communication. Undoubtedly, language remains our species' most sophisticated channel for exchanging information, but the verbal mode is increasingly complemented, sometimes even replaced, by other modes, among which the visual mode takes pride of place. Despite the fact that conveying information visually dates back to pre-historic times, accounting for visual communication in a scholarly viable manner remains difficult. One important reason for this is that while visuals (a broad term which in this book will be used to refer to all sorts of non-verbal information in static images, including not just pictures, but also for instance lay-out features, colors, typography, and motion/emotion lines in comics) usually have a structure, they do not have a grammar and vocabulary in the sense that language has. What complicates matters is that visuals are often accompanied by written language, for instance in the form of names, labels, captions, or tag lines, and it is this combination that is by far the most frequently studied variety of multimodal discourse. Insightful and programmatic work on visual and multimodal discourse has since the 1960s been done under the banner of semiotics, many of its more recent manifestations inspired by Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)."--

Successful communication requires optimal relevance to a target audience. Relevance theory (RT) provides an excellent model based on this insight, but the impact of the theory has until now been restricted due to an almost exclusive focus on spoken face-to-face communication. Visual and Multimodal Communication: Applying the Relevance Principle is the first book to systematically demonstrate how RT can fulfill its promise to develop into an inclusive theory of communication. In this book, Charles Forceville refines and adapts RT's original claims to show its applicability to static visuals and multimodal discourses in popular culture genres. Using colorful examples, he explains how RT can be expanded and adapted to accommodate mass-communicative visual and visual-plus-verbal messages. Forceville addresses issues such as the difference between drawing prospective addressees' attention to a message and persuading them to accept it; the thorny continuum from implicit to explicit information; and the role of genre. Case studies of pictograms, advertisements, cartoons, and comics provide contemporary and accessible examples of the importance of genre and of how the RT model can be connected to other approaches. By expanding the application of relevance theory to include mass-communicative messages, Visual and Multimodal Communication reintroduces a central framework of cognitive linguistics and pragmatics to a new audience and paves the way for an inclusive theory of communication.

This book draws on visual data, ranging from advertisements to postage stamps to digital personal photography, to offer a complex interpretation of the different social functions realised by these texts as semiotic artefacts. Framed within the media environment of the city of Hong Kong, the study demonstrates the importance of social context to meaning making and social semiotic multimodal analysis. This book will be of interest to readers in the arts, humanities and social sciences, particularly within the fields of semiotics, visual studies, design studies, media and cultural studies, anthropology and sociology.

This volume brings together two hitherto disparate domains of scholarly inquiry: organization and management studies on the one hand, and the study of visual and multimodal communication on the other. Within organization and management studies it has been recognized that organizational reality and communication are becoming increasingly visual, and, more generally, multimodal, whether in digital form or otherwise. Within multimodality studies it has been noted that many forms of contemporary communication are deeply influenced by organizational and managerial communication, as formerly formal and bureaucratic types of communication increasingly adopt promotional language and multimodal document presentation. Visual and Multimodal Research in Organization and Management Studies integrates these two domains of research in a way that will benefit both. In particular, it conceptually and empirically connects recent insights from visual and multimodality studies to ongoing discussions in organization and management theory. Throughout, the book shows how a visual/multimodal lens enriches and extends what we already know about organization, organizations, and practices of organizing, but also how concepts from organization and management studies can be highly productive in further developing insights on visual and multimodal communication. Due to its essentially interdisciplinary objectives, the book will prove inspiring for academics and scholars of management, the sociology of organizations as well as related disciplines such as applied linguistics and visual studies.

This textbook provides the first foundational introduction to the practice of analysing multimodality, covering the full breadth of media and situations in which multimodality needs to be a concern. Readers learn via use cases how to approach any multimodal situation and to derive their own specifically tailored sets of methods for conducting and evaluating analyses. Extensive references and critical discussion of existing approaches from many disciplines and in each of the multimodal domains addressed are provided. The authors adopt a problem-oriented perspective throughout, showing how an appropriate foundation for understanding multimodality as a phenomenon can be used to derive strong methodological guidance for analysis as well as supporting the adoption and combination of appropriate theoretical tools. Theoretical positions found in the literature are consequently always related back to the purposes of analysis rather than being promoted as valuable in their own right. By these means the book establishes the necessary theoretical foundations to engage productively with today’s increasingly complex combinations of multimodal artefacts and performances of all kinds.

This book examines the relationships between online visual interfaces and language use in educational contexts and the features that underpin them to explore the complex nature of online communication and its implications for educational practice. Adopting a case study approach featuring a global range of examples, the volume uniquely focuses on multimodal intercultural interactions, with a particular interest in videoconferencing, to look at how they project and reflect particular cultural values and tendencies concerning language use and how they elucidate the complex cultural identifications and affiliations inherent in intercultural encounters. The book employs a diverse range of theoretical and research frameworks to highlight the dynamic connections between digital technology, social life, and language use, and the ways in which they can inform language education, making this an ideal resource for students and scholars in applied linguistics, communication studies, media studies, information studies, and education.

This book offers insights into the translation and adaptation of illustrated texts in an era in which visual texts are perceived as a dominant perceptual frame for interpreting social and cultural phenomena. Using source texts including illustrated books, comics, graphic novels and animated films, the authors analyze their translations and adaptations to address the works as multimodal entities, in which even the replacement of one component affects the entire whole. Interviews with the artists - writers, illustrators and animators - will shed more light on the observations. This volume’s unique focus on the visual mode and the impact of its replacement on the multimodal whole is a topic that has not attracted as much attention as the translation of the verbal component, and will appeal to students and researchers of translation and adaptation, popular culture, media and communication, and children’s literature alike.