The 21st century is awash with ever more mixed and remixed images, writing, layout, sound, gesture, speech, and 3D objects. Multimodality looks beyond language and examines these multiple modes of communication and meaning making.
Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication represents a long-awaited and much anticipated addition to the study of multimodality from the scholar who pioneered and continues to play a decisive role in shaping the field. Written in an accessible manner and illustrated with a wealth of photos and illustrations to clearly demonstrate the points made, Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication deliberately sets out to locate communication in the everyday, covering topics and issues not usually discussed in books of this kind, from traffic signs to mobile phones.
In this book, Gunther Kress presents a contemporary, distinctive and widely applicable approach to communication. He provides the framework necessary for understanding the attempt to bring all modes of meaning-making together under one unified theoretical roof.
This exploration of an increasingly vital area of language and communication studies will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in the fields of English language and applied linguistics, media and communication studies and education.
Author(s): Gunther R. Kress
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2010
Language: English
Pages: 233
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1 Where meaning is the issue
Multimodality: simple, really
From semiotic system to semiotic resource
Cultural difference and communication: the 'reach' of the theory and the 'reach' of modes
The politics of naming
A satellite view of language
Chapter 2 The social environment of contemporary communication
An ethical approach to communication
Assumptions
Environments for communication: social frames and communicational possibilities
Power, authority and authorship
Social and theoretical consequences: ruling metaphors of participation, design, and production
Personal choices: existential insecurity or agency through participation and connection
Communication and meaning: fluidity, provisionality, instability
A prospective theory of communication: rhetoric, design, production
From language and grammar to semiotic resources
Mobility and portability
A word on 'pace'
The need for apt metaphors
Chapter 3 Communication: shaping the domain of meaning
Communication as semiotic work: a sketch of a theory
'Reading' and the reader's design of meaning
Provisionality in communication: rhetoric and design, newly configured
Environments of communication: a historical view
Refashioning social and semiotic domains: rhetoric and design
Chapter 4 A social-semiotic theory of multimodality
From a linguistic to a multimodal social-semiotic theory of meaning and communication
Linguistics, pragmatics and a social-semiotic approach to representation
Horses for courses: apt theories, useful framing
The motivated sign
The everyday, the banal and the motivated sign
Interest and the partiality of representation
Mimesis, signs and embodied experience
Chapter 5 Mode
Materiality and affordance: the social making of mode
The 'reach' of modes
What is a mode?
Is layout a mode?
Mode, meaning, text: 'fixing' and 'framing'
Mode as technology of transcription
Chapter 6 Meaning as resource: 'naming' in a multimodal social- semiotic theory
Naming aptly
New frames, new names
Making signs: resources, processes and agency
Processes and effects: making and remaking meaning
Chapter 7 Design and arrangements: making meaning material
Design in contemporary conditions of text-making
Design: an essential (re)focusing
What is design? A homely example
Design in social-semiotic environments
Changes in design: a brief look at recent history
Arrangements: making meanings material
What else is framed?
Discourse: ontological and epistemological framing
Chapter 8 Multimodal orchestrations and ensembles of meaning
The world arranged by me; the world arranged for me
The world arranged by me, the world arranged for me: orchestrating ensembles, staging of movement, motion, 'pace'
Aesthetics, style and ethics in multimodal ensembles
Chapter 9 Applying the theory: learning and evaluation; identity and knowledge
Learning and identity in a communicational frame
Reading as design
Semiosis, meaning and learning
Recognition, metrics and principles of assessment
Chapter 10 The social semiotics of convergent mobile devices: new forms of composition and the transformation of habitus
The social frame for the semiotic analysis
The affordances of Smartphones: a social-semiotic account
Affordances of the hardware
'Shape': designers' intentions and social implications
The representational affordances
The functionalities
Mobile Web access and usability: changes in social habitus
Implications
Gains and losses: some open questions
References
Index
