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. The investigation of music and space looks at how semiotic systems in classical music interact. Using children's books, the relationship between images and verbal meaning is then 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 presented 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.

Introduction Shoshana Dreyfus, Susan Hood, Maree Stenglin \ Part I Beyond Paralinguistics \ 1. The interpersonal semiotics of having a laugh Naomi Knight \
2. Body language in face-to-face teaching: A focus on textual and interpersonal meaning Susan Hood \ 3. Grappling with a non-speech language: Describing and theorizing the nonverbal multimodal communication of a child with an intellectual disability Shoshana Dreyfus \ Part II: Evolving accounts of space and music \
4. Spaced Out: An evolving cartography of a visceral semiotic Maree Stenglin
\ 5. Dealing with musical meaning: Towards an embodied model of music Ed MacDonald \ Part III: Intermodality between the visual, verbal and aural
\ 6. Organizing visual meaning: FRAMING and BALANCE in picture book images Clare Painter, J.R. Martin, Len Unsworth \ 7. Integrating visual and verbal meaning in multimodal text comprehension: Towards a model of inter-modal relations Eveline Chan \ 8. Rhythm and multimodal semiosis Theo van Leeuwen\ 9. Meaning beyond the margins: Learning to interact with books David Rose\ Part IV:Imaging representations of meaning\ 10. Visualizing logogenesis: Preserving the dynamics of meaning Michele Zappavigna\ 11. VISUALIZING MULTIMODAL PATTERNING David Caldwell & Michele Zappavigna\ Conclusion: Multimodal semiotics: Theoretical challenges J.R. Martin \ Index