Semiotic Margins Meaning in Multimodalities

Semiotic Margins analyses the meaning making potential of not only language, but modalities like laughter, music, colour, and architectural spaces. By examining resources often positioned on the side-line of mainstream semiotic accounts, this study raises the question of what counts as part of language and communication and why. Beginning with the more established nonverbal resources of communication, four major themes of modalities of meaning are covered. Music and space, an evolving cartography of modality, investigates how semiotic systems in classical music interact. Using children's books, the relationship between images and verbal meaning is the third theme explored, presenting implications for student literacy as well as a methodology for supporting children excluded from mainstream literary practices. Finally new approaches to transcribing representations in screen-based technologies are described through an examination of television advertisements. Semiotic Margins will appeal to linguists and semioticians wishing to pursue research in systemic functional linguistics and multimodal discourse analysis.

Shoshana Dreyfus is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, Australia. Susan Hood is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. Maree Stenglin is Lecturer of Literacy and Learning in the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Sydney, Australia.