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Scholars studying team-licensed fan apparel have begun to surface the meanings communicated through fan clothing, particularly focusing on its gendered nature. This study extends upon this previous research by examining children's sport fan apparel via a social semiotics theoretical framework. The authors collected 377 items from 14 teams in seven major leagues in the United States. Merging a feminist lens with multimodal critical discourse analysis methodology, they uncovered how discourses and meanings in the marketing of these materials communicate organizational practices and structures. The study determined that the marketing presented discourses of gender segregation and (false) gender neutrality, as well as discourses of good parenting that legitimized the consumption of merchandise as a reflection of parenting ideologies. Organizations must address internal gendered practices to produce marketing materials and artifacts supporting gender equity and inclusivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the verbal communicative strategies of engagement of female booktubers from Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. As starting point it reviews the online community of Booktube using the theoretical framework of the participatory culture. Methodologically, a multimodal discourse analysis was conducted but only contemplating the verbal aspects, supported by social semiotics. Results have highlighted how booktubers talk colloquially with their audience, including them in their discourse, taking care of them while encouraging possibilities of interaction or boosting forms of collaborating with third-parties to benefit their audiences without any personal gain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study explores the clan names and praises of the Mambwe-speaking people of Northern Zambia from a social semiotics perspective. Specifically drawing on the concept of semiotic assemblages, it considers the names and praises as more than just linguistic resources but as meaning-making collections that contribute to the collective self-representation of the Mambwe people. The assembled expressions reflect their worldviews, sociocultural narratives, and identities. The study shows the interconnectedness of gender roles, bioenvironmental factors, community activities, folklore, ethnicity, and self-asserting narratives within the contexts of clan names and praises. Furthermore, it demonstrates the multi-layered meanings resulting from the emotional forces of the interactions among individuals, living and non-living objects, events and bioenvironmental factors in time-spaces. It concludes that clan names and praises are narratives of expressions that represent the psycho-social and historical paths of the Mambwe people, and they play a crucial role in the intergenerational transfer of knowledge and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Affluent in semiotic resources and containing great communicability, Chinese university emblems have yet to attract much academic research. Drawing on studies of social semiotics, typographic landscaping and multimodal concepts, this paper explores the linguistic and social dimension of meaning-making practice and the entanglement of Chinese and Western elements in Chinese university emblems. Examining 156 university emblems in mainland China, this research developed a denotational inventory of Chinese university emblems. Adopting Kress and van Leeuwen's grammar of visual design, this research also scrutinised the connotative meaning of the visual contents. The findings show that the ensemble of meaning-making is achieved by the orchestration of three pivotal frameworks: synchronisation of various semiotic modes, influence of the social reality of China and imbuement of domestic and foreign ideologies. Consequently, the neo-Chinese style of modern Chinese university emblem design is constructed. With its integrative approach, the nuanced and comprehensive analysis of this research will generate fresh insights into the exploration of the social semiotic and typographic landscaping of university emblems in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During a classroom-based study that featured wordless and almost wordless picturebooks, instruction and adult mediation communicated to Kindergarten children that elements of visual art, design, and layout are fundamental to meaning-making when transacting with this format of literature. The illustration techniques described by Ray (2010) were used as an analytical lens to analyze the transcripts from the small group interactive sessions of an almost wordless picturebook featured during the research. The descriptive analyses of the transcripts reveal the rich viewing and talking opportunities that can be afforded during children's transactions with almost wordless picturebooks when these selections of literature are situated as aesthetic objects, and when children and adult mediators understand and appreciate how meaning is individually and synergistically represented by elements of visual art, design and layout. The findings are discussed in relation to the literature reviewed, and the theoretical frameworks of social semiotics and sociocultural theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May 2020, in the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, we set up the transmedia space PanMeMic, and involved our social networks, in a snowball fashion, to exchange observations and reflections on the changes in communication and social interactions ensuing from the restrictions imposed. We adopted a citizen approach towards co-constructing knowledge about semiotic practices, by integrating tenets of social semiotics, ethnography and citizen sociolinguistics. The article reports on the activities and discusses the potentials and limitations of the approach through analysis of the posts and discussions that took place in the PanMeMic Facebook group. It shows results quantitatively and then zooms in to offer a qualitative analysis of one discussion thread, with the aim of illustrating the potential and limitations of PanMeMic as a platform for citizen semiotic research and providing indications for future socially engaged and engaging research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how universities construe organizational identities and engage digital audiences through images on web homepages. Combining visual content analysis and a discourse-analytic approach informed by social semiotics, I interpret the discourses of identity in 400 images from organizational homepages of four top-tier public universities in Sydney, Australia – University of Sydney, University of New South Wales, University of Technology Sydney, and Macquarie University. Based on the social semiotic interpretation of images, I identify eight identity icons, each deploying a combination of semiotic resources to represent a specific organizational identity. The analysis suggests that universities prioritize featuring people, which results in an augmented sense of social presence on the homepage. Lastly, four identified strategies for digital audience engagement in images – proximation, alignment, equalization, and subjectivation – point to how these are instrumental in representing university life as both individual and shared experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on social semiotics and geosemiotics, this paper analyses multimodal texts written on different surfaces at a construction site. The analysis is based on longitudinal ethnographic work and a large collection of photos of handwritten texts that involve verbal language and other semiotic elements such as drawings or symbols. The analysis focuses on the multimodal design of the texts, their spatio-temporal contexts, and their temporal trajectories connected to the progression of the construction work. The analysis contributes to the existing research on language practices in manual work by providing new understanding of multimodal texts that are integral parts of construction workers' day-to-day language use. The analysis also speaks to the importance of longitudinal and visually-based research designs in analyzing the language practices of manual and physical work contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering the popularity of online platforms and their significant force in producing collective discourses, attitudes, and patterns of behaviours, this study critically examined the photographic portrayal of old Iranians on websites during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study focuses on this age group, which has been identified as the most vulnerable to the virus. Photographs of old people during COVID-19 are semiotic resources that enable researchers to excavate portrayals of ageing. Media portrayals of older adults gain resonance in ways they are constructed and societal effects that emerge through their widespread access. With an aim to contributing to the literature on visual social semiotic analysis, this study zoomed in on the portrayals of older Iranians on websites applying Kress and Van Leeuwen's visual grammar. The search for data, collected in the period of March to July 2020, yielded 39 results. The findings revealed that the portrayal of Iranian old people suffers from negative ageing stereotypes like ugliness, decline, and weakness. Notably, the analyzed photographs exhibited a higher degree of ageism towards old women than men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution investigates the campaign posters of the right-wing Swiss People's Party (SVP) in four communication domains: in public space, in the mass media, their impact on other political actors and manipulations of the posters. This approach combines social semiotics, discourse analysis, media linguistics, and linguistic landscaping to present a comprehensive account of the posters' usage and design. Relying on social semiotics, we first analyze the posters themselves. We then show how the posters are reproduced in journalistic news media which creates a visual framing of the discussion about migration. This framing effect is also evidenced by the fact that many political actors adapt to the SVP's visual language. Consequently, the discussion about migration increasingly follows the SVP's logic. In a fourth analytical step, we show how the posters become objects of manipulation that turn them into a place of public debate. We sum up by pointing out the affordances that the posters offer to actors in these different domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberalism as phenomenon has been noted for its pervasiveness, persistence and negative impact in society. The uncertainty, pessimism and tension associated with neoliberal societies have found expression in popular culture entertainment, more specifically in dystopic depictions of societies influenced by neoliberal logic. These dystopic presentations offer fantastical depictions as allegories, holding up our current realities for critique. While many studies have examined presentations of dystopia from various scholarly perspectives, we employ here a social semiotics approach to examine how semiotic resources are deployed in dystopic presentations of neoliberalism – neoliberal dystopia – to engender critical stances and attitudes. Using excerpts from the Netflix science fiction series Black Mirror, our study shows how combinations of semiotic resources are employed to draw critical attention to representations of neoliberal realities and society. The use of a social semiotics approach offers systematicity in the examination of representations of meaning via the utilization of established analytical frameworks, adding to already-existing commentaries on neoliberal dystopia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on the importance of the social to the analysis of historical multimodal texts and how some concepts and analytical tools from SFL can prevent researchers from getting the most from their data. Building on the work of Ledin and Machin (2018), it looks at three main areas of concern when dealing with historical multimodal texts—context, attention to micro, meso and macro levels, and historically-developed affordances—and uses examples of Edwardian book inscriptions to suggest ways that archival research can help overcome these problems. Overall, it argues how greater attention to the social brings to the fore how semiotic choices can be used strategically to foreground individual positions and/or subvert aesthetic norms. In doing so, it frames historical multimodal texts not as static representations of communication, but as dynamic, highly contextual and involved in a complex process of co-construction between producers, their imagined audiences and broader sociocultural meanings. It also suggests that a focus on historical context can also move multimodal studies beyond a predominant focus on the contemporary, as well as challenge the supposed novelty of certain communicative practices, thereby fostering more nuanced interpretations that recognise the broader lineage of patterned practices and uses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research from both managerial branding and social semiotics has acknowledged the construction of space for retail establishments, while the experiential turn in brand practice has resulted in the more deliberate use of space to build identifiable characteristics across outlets. As a "retail apocalypse" has been sweeping across the U.S., forcing numerous chains and malls to close, these outlets often leave a host of brand-identifying materials behind after their closing. As the materials were once used to define the space and communicate a brand identity, they continue to do so in the afterlife of stores, forcing future tenants and the surrounding community to deal with the remains from the former capitalistic enterprises. Using a reflexive, visual ethnography, this paper shows how the materials used for brand purposes outlast establishments and pose obstacles for new tenants by casting a shadow and structuring new tenants as subordinate or lesser than the original outlets. The increased use of branded spaces coupled with the extensive closure of retail outlets has made this a pressing concern as communities need to deal with the trash departing retails have left behind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the use of social media, particularly Facebook, for public engagement purposes by nonprofit organizations (NPOs) in the United Arab Emirates. It draws on an interpretation of engagement as a multidimensional process with cognitive and affective characteristics where power relations between an organization and its public should be addressed. This paper combines content analysis with social semiotics to examine the multimodal production and enactment of engagement as a relational process at the level of the verbal, visual, and paratext modes. The study reveals that the use of Facebook by NPOs is marked by a strong control over discourse and low affective involvement, where fundraising becomes the primary function of the platforms. This demonstrates that the philanthropic identity and mission of most NPOs obscure the relationship management objective of these organizations and undermine their ability to effectively engage stakeholders on social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cultural Studies of Science Education is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Digital 'flythroughs' are increasingly being used by museums to promote themselves to their publics and to extend their spatial and experiential boundaries. These complex, multimodal artefacts use 3D animation, AI imagery, drone footage, sound, music and other modes to construct a parallel museum experience. Such an experience is markedly dissimilar from an 'ordinary' embodied relationship to architectural space, and instead constructs an experience of elevated velocity, height and glissade. These movement style choices construct a 'non-naturalistic' experience of moving through space that differs considerably from the embodied experience constructed by digital walkthroughs, augmented and virtual reality and ordinary corporeal movement through a museum. Instead, they offer a potential imaginary, a supernatural or 'extracorporeal' embodiment of a kind typically associated with fantasy films, video games, amusement rides and dreams. This paper analyses 10 flythroughs from a variety of museums and locations through the lens of multimodal social semiotics. The systems of movement styles and visual validity are used to explore how meanings are made in the flythroughs and how they may be understood in terms of the 'fantasy' coding orientation. The implications for how museums construct their respective identities and relate to their publics are also unpacked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While museums have always been multimodal in and of themselves, and while museum studies have long engaged with different modalities in the museum (exhibition design, visitor movement, etc.), a comprehensive understanding of museums as 'multimodal constellations' has been missing. This was certainly the case in the 1990s, particularly for linguistics as a discipline, in which language was likely to be viewed as an isolated, and primary, form of communication. Yet in a museum, every label is connected to an exhibit, an exhibition, and the museum itself, and communication needs to be understood as a holistic, multimodal enterprise. For me as a linguist involved with the Australian Museum, Australia's foremost museum of natural history, the multimodal environment of language was critical in our project to improve communication with visitors through better label writing. This article explains the personal and disciplinary developments resulting in the centering of multimodality as a research agenda. An important feature of this approach is the metafunctional theory of Michael Halliday as a core tenet. I explain how this theory of meaning operates across different levels of the institution, in relation to different modes, and in relation to subsequent developments in multimodal research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This reflection focuses on the integration of a museum visit into a higher education course for the purpose of teaching multimodality in an embodied way. Informed by the social semiotic approach to multimodality, the course aims to help students critically interact with multimodal texts using multimodal concepts. In this pedagogical process, exhibitions as multimodal texts gain a special place. This reflection highlights four activities which were designed to support the embodied learning of multimodality during a visit to a youth gallery with a group of university students. These activities included two types of explorations, responding to guiding questions, group discussions and map drawing. This reflection concludes with some thoughts on the benefits of the embodied teaching of multimodality through museum visits in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Semiotica is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study examines sexual humour in some Ghanaian and Nigerian YouTube comedy skits through the theoretical lens of social semiotics. It focuses on two YouTubers, Jeffrey Nortey from Ghana and Viper the Wiper from Nigeria, purposively sampled for their extensive use of sexual humour. Analysis reveals that they employ intertextuality, exaggeration, and dramatic irony as their key communicative strategies. Intertextuality draws on folk knowledge, the Bible, social, and religious issues. Exaggeration is used to depict actions that are humanly impossible, while dramatic irony introduces unexpected twists. The effectiveness of these strategies is evident from the numerous views and comments their skits receive, highlighting their successful engagement with the taboo topic of sex. However, the study also notes the potential negative impact of some sexual jokes, which may reinforce harmful stereotypes about men and women. It underscores the importance of responsibly portraying human sexuality in humour, advocating the avoidance of perpetuating damaging societal norms through comedic narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how emoji make meaning with language in TikTok comments. It offers a social semiotic account which models emoji-text relations as a system of convergence, involving three kinds of semiotic relations: ideational concurrence, interpersonal resonance, and textual synchronicity. The paper focuses in detail on the comment feed of a TikTok lip-sync video which uses audio from Julia Gillard's iconic misogyny speech. It considers the role that emoji pfhgilay in enacting ambient affiliation in these comments, whereby users share positive evaluation of the TikTok Creator and express alignment with values relating to modern feminism. The work is grounded in previous corpus-based studies by the authors of the social functions of emoji across a range of social media platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract\nSharing personal stories with others is essential to human interaction and language development. To communicate, individuals use a variety of semiotic resources, including images, symbols, and written and spoken language. These modes are deployed in the co-construction of a daily face-to-face conversation. A self-created film can serve as a valuable resource to facilitate a deeper understanding of a personal experience, especially where spoken or written language may present a challenge, for example, for people who rely on augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). Although the AAC literature indicates that using videos delivers benefits for aided communicators, guidelines on how to self-create, use, and transcribe them are rare. The present paper, a tutorial, describes how people who use AAC can develop a personal-video-scene (PVS) via the Film as Observable Communication (FaOC) method to utilize self-created films in sharing their stories. The first part of this paper, the theoretical framework, describes theories, methods, and practices from the fields of AAC, social semiotics, and visual anthropology, on which the FaOC method is based. The second part provides a step-by-step tutorial delivering practical guidance on how to create, use, and transcribe the PVS as a resource in conversations.Read the transcriptWatch the video on Vimeo© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to analyze the effect of an illustrator's visual style in representing nature. The focus is on the author's own artistic project in which the personal relationship with nature is reflected. As for theory, the style used in the representation is seen as a combination of semiotic resources. In this case, the style is inspired by historical images: old still life paintings and illustrations from natural encyclopedias and field guides. The stylistic influences work as a connotative semiotic resource. From a wider perspective, how we represent nature creates social discourses of nature and our attitudes toward it. The results indicate that fact-based communication of nature would also benefit from the emotional effect of esthetic imagery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines linguaculturally diverse university students' affective translingual practices of using emojis and languages in computer-mediated communication. Research studies have investigated the sociopragmatic uses of emojis from the perspectives of social semiotics, language socialisation, and translingual practices. This study expands on these perspectives and further adopts enregisterment as a conceptual framework to explore the emergence of emoji variations and other affective expressions in online discussions about news and social media content. The primary data were collected from written discourses on Facebook across 8 weeks and through follow-up data-focused interviews. The results present the multilingual participants' metapragmatic commentaries on particular uses of face emojis in relation to emotive discourses, enregistered voices, and embodied contextualisation. The results exemplify the multimodal enregisterment of affective translingual practices through which emoji users' playful performances can be recognised and enacted in online socialisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has shown that arts-based approaches facilitate literacy learning in children; however, few studies have focused on the integration of art and early writing in community-based Chinese heritage language classes, which have been marginalized from the formal educational discourse in the United States. By drawing on the theoretical perspectives on social semiotics, this paper explored how young Chinese heritage learners engage in "writing" Chinese characters using fallen leaves. The data sources included field notes of observations, video recordings of the class, and the artifacts made by the children. Multimodal analysis revealed that the teacher invited the students to write together and created a social context for children to compose writing artwork. Children engaged with their composition through a variety of modes. This study has implications for research, practice, and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how seven Swedish digital teaching platforms in mathematics make use of the affordances provided by various modalities and dynamic functions. A model based on social semiotics is used to analyse how dynamic functions are used, whether or not the language is technically oriented, if relational or operational processes are emphasised, and the logic in the text. The analysis focuses on how the dynamic elements in teaching materials are used and potential consequences of their use. The results reveal a tendency to predominantly allocate dynamic and interactive elements to tasks related to theoretical parts and examples, and also that the most common dynamic element, film, has substantial potential to support meaning-making in several respects. For example, a voice-over can easily contribute a personal touch, add further logic to the content, or give an explanation based on an operational process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an evaluation of an English for specific purposes (ESP) curriculum using the social semiotic perspective. This perspective highlights the importance of authenticity, multimodality, and communicative competence in ESP teaching and learning. Five main components of the ESP curriculum at the Port and Shipping Management Department of a Maritime Polytechnic in Indonesia were evaluated, including the syllabus, lesson plans, resources, teaching activities, and assessment. In conducting the evaluation, the authors developed an evaluation framework based on three existing frameworks, namely Stufflebeam’s context input process product (CIPP) model for evaluation, Kaewpet’s ESP program evaluation, and Tsou and Chen’s ESP program evaluation. Multiple data collection methods were used and multiple perspectives of research participants were invited. The findings of the study revealed that there were several problems in the ESP curriculum of the Port and Shipping Management Department. The main problem was the poorly designed syllabus that has caused drawbacks on the other components, such as irrelevant and unauthentic teaching materials and activities, low variety of teaching media, lack of multimodal resources used in the classroom, and low validity and reliability of assessments. Pedagogical implications regarding the results of the evaluation are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transcreation is an inter-cultural and inter-linguistic activity, which has obtained particular academic interest recently. However, few studies have reviewed the current status quo on transcreation systematically, although transcreation has been applied in various fields such as literature and advertising translation. In this study, a systematic literature review is conducted to shed light on this topic by identifying and analysing genres, foci, methods, and theories related to transcreation. The databases cover Scopus, Web of Science and CNKI from 1995 to 2023. A total of 61 publications were identified with PRISMA 2020. The qualitative findings showed that (1) most studies of transcreation focus on literary and advertising, while other fields of audiovisual, news and political, training and interpreting need to be explored; (2) research foci of transcreation strategies, culture and ideology gain more attention while transcreation process and evaluation, localization and persuasion have not been much examined; (3) content analysis is most frequently adopted while other qualitative methods are less used. Besides, there is a lack of using quantitative and mixed methods; (4) systematical functional linguistics is often used as a pointcut to examine strategies of transcreation. Besides, multimodal social semiotics is used to explore transcreation through texts, pictures and videos. Other linguistic theories and cross-disciplinary theories remain unexplored in transcreation. In conclusion, this study provides a review of transcreation and translation studies and reveals some research gaps that could enlighten future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction. The subject of this article is communicative resources, which are selected by partners from a huge variety of linguistic means, functional styles, rhetorical techniques, and subject activities, and through which a common semantic space between individuals is generated.Methodology and sources. As a methodological platform we propose the principles of praxis-oriented social semiotics. Being one of the relatively late trends of semiotic research, social semiotics focuses attention not so much on signs or sign systems as on social signifying practices as regular, repetitive, recognisable types of actions: the actions of communication participants are endowed with the properties of sign systems through which relations between individuals are discovered, made visible and meaningful. The mechanisms of meaning production, from the point of view of the participants of the event, are analysed using the concept of ‘discursive practices’, understood as speech actions in order to solve a variety of practical interpersonal tasks.Results and discussion. As an individual learns a variety of interpersonal discursive practices, different relational systems become available to him/her. Specific discursive practices allow individuals to present different versions of their self, justify their actions, maintain dominance and/or subordination relations, thus demonstrating mastery of the communicative situation. Following the principles of praxis-oriented social semiotics, it can be argued that interpersonal relationships involve what can be called a discourse of trust, personal involvement in relationships, intimacy/closeness.Conclusion. The described symbolic regulators allow not only to semiotically comprehend the social positions of interacting parties, but also to offer self-control procedures and an arsenal of communicative actions to the participants of interpersonal communication as means of behaviour management in situations of interpersonal communication.

In social networks, communication is dynamic due to the different semiotic codes used. This research analyses the multimodal discourse on X when images (photos, videos, GIFs, memes, emojis, etc.) and texts are combined to create an attractive visual narrative for followers. The main objective is to identify common semiotic structures or formats in this network. The methodology is exploratory in nature and is based on the selection of a strategic non-probabilistic sample of accounts from the educational ecosystem. These accounts were randomly selected and aimed at the educational community in X. The results of the analysis support the communicative tendency to use these multimodal texts that combine visual and verbal narrative in X publications. Therefore, further study of this strategy is warranted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instagram texts need to be analyzed from a multimodal perspective because a large part of it on this social media platform is conveyed to the audience through images. The multimodal critical discourse analysis approach, like others, focuses on power and ideology concepts, as well as the context involved in text production and at the same time, due to attention to multifacetedness and using the social semiotics approach, it is suitable for analyzing Instagram texts. The study of childhood, motherly and fatherly identity construction on child-centered Instagram pages was chosen as a case study. For this purpose, first the analytical framework of Kress and Leeuwen was explained with the focus on how to analyze each of the intellectual, interpersonal, and hybrid meta-roles. Then only the child-centered page of fraternity that is among the top-ranked Iranian Instagram influencer pages was analyzed using the same method. Findings were analyzed by separating texts as corpus. Following that, the discourses of patriarchy and capitalism were identified and their connection to social and industrial context was described. Findings also demonstrated the fluidity and simultaneity of identities influenced by the emergence of social media.

This article addresses the issue of motivated signs in semiotic theory and practice. It examines two influential versions of the term, Saussure's and Kress's, focussing on and triggered by Kress's influence. It claims Kress's importance lies not so much in theory as such, as in his analytic practice, multimodal analysis, as underpinned by this theory. Accordingly, it deploys a version of this practice on Kress as he is 'doing theory'. It uses his late work Multimodality (Kress, Gunther. 2010. Multimodality. London: Bloomsbury) as the main source of examples of theory and objects of analysis, and applies a similar approach to Saussure. The outcome is a theoretically-informed corpus including many examples of motivated signs in use. From this empirical corpus the article makes some indicative generalizations about the role of these signs in semiotic practice. It shows how pervasive these signs are, and how important these are for analysis. It connects them with a crucial but under-researched aspect of all social uses of meaning, the modality meta-function (checking validity/modality of all semiotic acts), in which motivated signs play an essential role. It reveals a more complex Saussure, more complementary to Kress, and enables more powerful multimodal analyses of social meanings and functions of text and talk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the background of a longstanding collaboration between Gunther Kress's research group in London and my own research group in Stockholm, I reflect, in this paper, on the role of Kress's ideas in our joint development of a social semiotic, multimodal, and design-oriented approach to learning, an approach which sees learning as performative, and as an activity in which learners create their own learning paths. I first discuss how, for Kress, this path has three elements, the affordances of the learning resources available to the learner, the learner's 'interest' which turns aspects of these resources into 'prompts' for learning, and the learner's active interpretation and transformation of these aspects, the results of which can then be recognized and valued as 'signs of learning'. However, recognizing learning also needs to take account of the dimension of time, so as to make it possible to assess whether learners have gained knowledges and skills they did not have at an earlier stage. I then discuss the role of context in Kress's thinking about learning. For Kress, context is another vital aspect of a social semiotic theory of learning. On the one hand, Kress focuses here on the specific, unique contexts in which individual learners create their own learning paths. On the other hand, he recognizes that signs will always carry social and political relations. Reflecting on the dynamic relation between individual learners and the way institutions regulate ways of learning, I discuss both the continued role of institutional learning contexts and their hidden curricula, and the way emerging technologies facilitate individual learning paths and interactive, participatory forms of learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a conceptual analysis and critical review of the notion of 'affordance' and its uptake, transformation and application in the work of Gunther Kress. It traces its origins and explores how Kress, co-founder of social semiotics, (re)conceptualised affordance and incorporated it in his social semiotic theory of sign making, defining affordance in terms of the "potentials and limitations of specific modes". The paper discusses how his take on the term was received, and develops a radical critique questioning the analytical merits of affordance. It concludes with a call for a return to Kress's original question of exactly what it is about a form (signifier) that makes it suitable, in the eyes of the sign maker, for what they want to express (signified), and to consider materiality and social convention alongside the sign maker's lifeworld, audience, situation, and conditions of sign making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a practitioner-based account of the uptake of Kress's ideas on literacy, literature and meaning-making in South African educational contexts, in particular, his integration of politics, semiosis and literacy. It examines the affective force of these ideas in South African classrooms in certain institutions during the immediate post-apartheid period from 1994 onwards, showing how Kress's key concepts and principles provided a transformative theoretical framework for the work of progressive educators. A Kress-inspired framework propelled new conceptualisations of literacy and meaning-making in these classrooms and beyond – at all levels, from primary through to tertiary – and fuelled research from 1994 into the first decade of the new millennium. Given Kress's insistence on the social, as in social semiotics, and his stress on the integration of representation, communication and situatedness, this article focuses on his ideas in context, how and why they were put to work and what their outcomes were. It is proposed that the South African case – although unique in many ways – may be relevant to postcolonial and decolonising educational contexts in the South more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much research has been dedicated in recent years to the rhetoric and poetics of digital discourse. These have tried to grasp the techno-structure of "screen writing", examining with precision the links between the coded dimension and its visible manifestations, or studying closely the role of the "architext", the technical, industrial and ideological guidance of writing and reading practices by software tools and platforms. I myself have actively participated in this field of research, being interested on the one hand in the role of code and algorithms, and on the other hand in the role of software that facilitates the process of digital writing and at the same time constrains it, models it, normalizes it; The question of knowing which visions of the world are encoded in software tools and platforms has been central to my research on digital discourse, since it seems obvious that social networks such as Facebook, for example, have not only popularized digital writing by providing authors with a theoretically unlimited number of receivers, but also by encoding in the device visions of what friendship, community, popularity, life in society, and the contemporary subject mean. Fewer are the analyses that place at the center of their methodology the "interpretative filters" mobilized by the subject, faced with the digital discourse. In this article, I will try to circumscribe the rhetoric of digital discourse by relying on two complementary methodological frameworks: the theories of intermediality, which will allow me to grasp some of its techno-semiotic specificities through the prism of production and reception, and social semiotics, which places at the center of the analysis the action of the "interpretive filters" mobilized by the subject in dealing with signs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even after the demise of its territorial caliphate in 2019, ISIS persists as a potent threat, adapting to new technologies and maintaining its status as an active insurgency. Amidst the backdrop of the terror group's demonstrated resilience, this paper examines its practice of (de)legitimation and language of persuasion through a multimodal argumentation analysis. It combines the argumentation strategies (topoi) proposed by Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) and tools from Social Semiotics with argumentation theories, achieved through a comprehensive enthymematic deconstruction of arguments in ISIS's e-magazine, Dabiq. The findings reveal four interrelated sets of plausibly inferable premises, namely, advantage and disadvantage; threat and obligation; negative consequence and history; and authority and Shariah law. These premises fall within broad social, political, historical, and religious categories and are deliberately crafted to lend support to ISIS's desired conclusions, aimed at systematically altering the addressees' state of knowledge and eventually eliciting acceptance from the intended public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Shāhnama, valor is a fundamental and extensive concept, interlinked with other notions such as wisdom, nobility, warriorship, courage, and reputation. This article aims to examine how the concept of valor is linguistically and visually expressed in Shāhnama; what conceptual metaphors has Ferdowsi employed to elucidate the concept of valor in his poetry, and what techniques has the miniature artist utilized to visualize these metaphors? Has the artist merely adhered to the text or employed creative approaches to convey this concept? To answer these questions, the research adopts George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's conceptual metaphor theory as its theoretical framework. The miniatures are selected from the Houghton (Tahmāsebi) Shāhnama, and their analysis is conducted using Kress and van Leeuwen's social semiotic approach to visual analysis. The findings indicate that, in addition to employing conventional elements such as the appearance of actors, composition, information value, framing, and salience, the miniature artist has utilized elements of performance like participant presence, scene requirements, and vector types to create action. Furthermore, relational elements such as point of view, distance, and contact have been used to depict conceptual metaphors of valor. In some of these images, the artist has been innovative in representing these metaphors, sometimes aligning with the overall narrative and sometimes diverging from it. Techniques such as salience, composition, and framing have been employed to augment and intensify the meaning of heroic metaphors in the miniatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores self-visual presentation practices by female political candidates on Facebook during Kenya's political campaigns that culminated in the national elections of 2022. The unit of analysis is the Facebook profile image of the women leaders. Image-centrism is operationalized as the extent to which 'the image' becomes the primary mode of self-presentation in political communication discourse. The study adopts a social semiotic approach to image interpretation postulated by Roland Barthes (1972. Mythologies. (A. Lavers. Trans) (Original work published 1957), 1977. Rhetoric of the image. In Image, music, text (pp. 32–51). Hill and Wang) and Kress and van Leeuwen (1996. Reading images: The grammar of visual design. Routledge, 2006. Reading images: The grammar of visual design (2nd ed.). Routledge). Using Kress and van Leeuwen's approach, images are studied as 'linguistic codes' that have their own 'grammatical' structure. Barthes's approach explores the cultural dimension of the images. The argument here is that visual communication is context-bound, and the theoretical premise laid is that politics is given direction, shape, and impetus by the culture of a people. In order to understand visual political communication in Kenya, therefore, the study analyses and interprets images from the lens of the wider African cultural contexts within which this communication takes place. The overarching questions in this study include: How did female politicians in Kenya strategically use Facebook images for self-representation during the political campaigns in 2022? How have women politicians in Kenya interwoven cultural ideology with visual political communication on their Facebook pages? The ultimate conclusion is that political images not only serve as discourses for communicating political ideas and making political statements, but they also serve as self-representation modes as well as cultural manifestation codes that illuminate specific societal concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that ethnic paintings connotate situational ethnicity, adjusted by social change and ethnic boundaries. Based on anthropological fieldwork focusing on painter and mercantile communities, social-political connotations of ethnic art are discussed by applying an analysis of social semiotics in three discourses, employing the case of post-1990 Nepal. In particular: 1) Modern visual expressions of ethnicity are adopted into anti-hierarchical representations, as people engage in ethnic politics and cultural activities. 2) The two genres of ethnic painting, paubhā, and thangka, which were developed by traditional creators and informed by ethnicity, have experienced and developed a cross-boundary mode of operating in industries in response to social change. 3) In the market and mass media, the narrative of value construction regarding the tradition of ethnic art reveals a sign arena that identifies a drift toward the nation, the state, and civilization, prepensely attempting to mobilize semiotic resources through the lens of politics, the market, and global values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to recent calls in sociolinguistics and social semiotics to study the material, technological and embodied features of writing, this article examines Chinese users' experiences and practices with the emergent technology of bullet comments on Bilibili, a major video-sharing platform and breeding ground for online subcultures. As one of the first studies based on in-depth interviews with its long term users, this article demonstrates that the unique design of bullet comments, by inserting writing into a moving screen, creates multimedia, multimodal semiotic affordances, reinforces "participatory spectacles," and facilitates powerful multisensory, bonding experiences similar to the (secondary) orality culture. Users' diverse range of adaptive and creative practices, which resemiotize available linguistic, visual and cultural resources to create new meaning-making possibilities, are analysed. Considering the recent "desubculturization" of Bilibili and its increased interactions with mainstream culture and the state media, this timely study is well positioned to capture users' observations about this transition, and assess potential impacts on their experiences and writing practices. It is pointed out that the new synergy of youth nationalism and the technology of bullet comments reflects the complex interplay between writing as a technologized social-semiotic practice, and the wider social, cultural and political conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on interviews with, and images from, a selection of female participants, we develop the notion of semiotic assemblages to examine tattoos as mobile semiotic material for embodied meaning-making, with multi-located trajectories linking the tattooed bodies to different spatial networks. In turn, we draw on the social semiotic approach to multimodality by looking at assemblages of tattoos as vibrant material, pregnant with thing-power which, while re-making the bodies of individual tattoo owners, simultaneously shapes and semiotically remediates physical and affective (e.g. emotional and memorial) objects and feelings. We illustrate how corporeal materials and activities, and the incorporeal conceptual, perceptual and affective senses and feelings are remediated across boundaries of language, geography, semiotic modes, media, and chains of mediation to make meaning. We end with a suggestion that multimodal analysis of semiotic assemblages needs to take a multiscalar approach to account for mobilities, movements and flow, and the continuities and disconnections in forms and meanings the dynamics of the connectedness produce across different scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study employs social semiotics as a multimodal analytical framework to explore various communication modes employed in Bob Marley's 1974 "Natty Dread" album to describe the Rastaman. The album's cover design, including images, font style, and colours, carry significant meanings that contribute to the representation of the Rasta identity. Marley's lexical choices, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives and noun phrases also play a crucial role in presenting the Rasta identity. Additionally, Marley utilises various literary devices such as repetition, metaphor, allusion, and imagery to vividly describe the Rastaman. The song titles and their arrangement on the album form a cohesive narrative depicting the Rastaman's life. In essence, the "Natty Dread" album portrays the Rastaman as a humble individual connected to the streets. The Rastaman's physical appearance is distinguished by his distinctive dreadlocks. His lifestyle embraces simplicity, a deep connection with nature, the pursuit of freedom and happiness, love, peace, unity, and rebellion against the oppressive establishment. Material possessions hold little importance for the Rastaman as he considers his spiritual devotion to Jah (God) and his commitment to his community paramount. Furthermore, an inseparable part of the Rastaman's culture is his use of marijuana and music, particularly reggae, which serves as a powerful tool with which he combats social injustices and inequalities in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the promotion of multiliteracy in educational artifacts from the perspective of information design. In the current social context of multiple languages and media, there is a dialogue about the emerging presence of multimodal resources in school environments. From this perspective, the objective is to identify which of these are most present in Portuguese textbooks for the Second Cycle, adoptable for 2022/2023. The aim is also to indicate which characteristics contribute to the development of multiple literacy in children. The theoretical, interdisciplinary path between design and education is based on precepts about the modes of symbolization of graphic language, social semiotics, and multimodality in learning. The exploratory research in the collected textbooks made it possible to check the symbolic modes in 4,396 pages. The examples presented went through direct observation and description of the structural characteristics of the contents. As a result, the most present multimodal ecosystem, whether to represent process cycles, timelines, spatial or quantitative data, was the infographics. This, however, requires urgent investigations into its construction, analogue-to-digital relationship, and decoding with the target audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A team of literacy, science, and theatre educators have been working to engage children in an urban public school system in the United States through embodied performances, where students embody and dramatise science ideas. This study focuses on one fourth‐grade classroom when instruction was done remotely due to Covid‐19. Children in the class were asked to compose videos of themselves acting out and/or exploring science phenomena and concepts, and we analysed the affordances of these multimodal compositions. We situate the need for this study in claims from the Next Generation Science Standards that literacy skills are necessary to build and communicate science knowledge. In doing so, we center social semiotics perspectives that conceive of composition broadly as production‐oriented processes drawing from various semiotic resources. The multimodal compositions in Mr. M's science class included both primarily embodied compositions and primarily digital compositions, and we elaborate on one focal example of each in the findings. Intertwined affordances of the focal children and their classmates' multimodal science compositions include opportunities to creatively engage with and negotiate science ideas, to draw from personal and social knowledge during meaning‐making, and to intentionally make rhetorical choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically explores the use of satire and humour by fast-foods outlets in South Africa and Zimbabwe to advertise and market their menu through digital media platforms, Facebook and Twitter. Using Nando's South Africa and Mambo's Chicken, in Zimbabwe, as case studies, we examine how satire and humour are used as advertising strategies, and as a reflection of these countries' economic and political environments. Consumers are overwhelmed with information coming from different sources such as Television, radio, newspapers and Internet. The paper's theoretical approach is gleaned from advertising and satire. We argue that through their encounter with food, consumers tend to understand the reason behind their 'empty stomach', and mediate on prevailing socio-political and economic issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article extends to the study of populist argumentation a framework for the analysis of inferences implicitly emerging from multimodal artifacts. The framework builds on a post-structuralist approach to populism and integrates multimodal critical discourse studies and argumentation studies, specifically the Argumentum Model of Topics. Particular emphasis is laid on the contribution of visual discourse to the process of inference-making in interrelation with verbal discourse. We illustrate the framework by examining the social media posts of three populist right-wing parties/party members from Sweden, Greece and Romania. Finally, we discuss future avenues for the analysis of populist communication practices online from the perspective we propose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]