Search results for "modality."

Transitivity prominence within and across modalities

2020

The idea of transitivity as a scalar phenomenon is well known (e.g., Hopper & Thompson 1980; Tsunoda 1985; Haspelmath 2015). However, as with most areas of linguistic study, it has been almost exclusively studied with a focus on spoken languages. A rare exception to this is Kimmelman (2016), who investigates transitivity in Russian Sign Language (RSL) on the basis of corpus data. Kimmelman attempts to establish a transitivity prominence hierarchy of RSL verbs, and compares this ranking to the verb meanings found in the ValPal database (Hartmann, Haspelmath & Bradley 2013). He arrives at the conclusion that using the frequency of overt objects in corpus data is a successful measure o…

The audio describer as a cultural mediator

2017

AbstractAudio Description (AD) is a modality of audiovisual translation that consists of making cultural products accessible to people who are blind or partially-sighted. Our study focuses on the contrastive analysis of the AD of four films in English and Spanish, our objective being to determine how the same visual cultural reference is described in two languages and for two target cultures. Using a descriptive methodology, we categorise and analyse cultural references followingDíaz Cintas and Remael’s (2007)classification and determine the translation strategies used. Our research shows that the decisions that the describer makes are conditioned by the distance, not only geographical but …

A multimodal analysis of facework strategies in a corpus of charity ads on British television

2013

Abstract The aim of this article is to carry out a qualitative multimodal analysis of the codification of verbal and non-verbal politeness strategies in a sub-corpus of five charity commercials aired on British television. Brown and Levinson's (1987) verbal politeness strategies are taken as a starting point together with a detailed analysis of facework that is realized through paralinguistic and extralinguistic modes of communication ( Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006 , Machin, 2010 ). In what we have identified as the problem phase of the commercial, our analysis has revealed that advertisers deliberately attempt to create threats to the viewer's positive and negative face by making him/her fe…

Can you put your finger on it? : The effects of writing modality on Finnish students’ recollection

2018

Digitalisation has changed and broadened the ways people write. In higher education, typing is a common practice both for note-taking and for completing written assignments, relegating pen and pape...

Individual and Collaborative Semiotic Work in Document Design

2017

This article examines the concepts of agency, transformation and transduction in the context of document design. These concepts have been previously used to describe communicative actions and sign-making among individuals: whereas agency focuses on the individual’s capabilities as a sign-maker, transformation and transduction describe how individuals transform meanings within one mode of communication or from one mode to another. Organizational communication, however, is rarely an individual effort, particularly in corporate settings: producing multimodal documents that communicate on behalf of entire organizations, such as annual reports, constitutes a collaborative effort involving a vari…

Constructing female identities through feminine hygiene TV commercials

2009

Abstract In this paper we report the results of a qualitative multimodal analysis of a corpus of Spanish and British TV ads featuring female hygiene products such as tampons, liners and sanitary towels/pads. We contend that advertisers of menstruation-related products employ a wide range of strategies to convey both overt information about the products advertised, as well as to – and more importantly – indirectly transmit stereotypical beliefs of women which inevitably helps reproduce and sometimes perpetuate a gender-biased type of discourse ( Holmes and Marra, 2005 ). Crook's (2004) distinction between the product-claim and the reward dimension in ads has been taken as the starting point …

Sense Activation Triggering in English Epistentials: Attention Distribution, Contextual Modulation of Meaning, and Categorization Issues

2015

Drawing on Talmy’s forthcoming The Attention System of Language and elaborating on a series of previous studies, this paper addresses the interrelation of attention distribution, contextual modulation of meaning, and categorization issues in the area of evidentiality and epistemic modality Adopting a corpus-based approach, it will investigate how the default salience levels of evidential and epistemic semantic components in so-called epistentials (linguistic items that syncretistically represent evidential and epistemic components) can be raised, lowered, or even inhibited under the impact of immediately adjacent items that themselves associate evidential or epistemic semantic components (i…

Book review : David Machin (ed.), Visual Communication

2016

Languaging in Ultima Thule: Multilingualism in the Life of a Sami Boy

2008

Abstract In this paper we investigate multilingualism as a phenomenon which pervades different social and cultural levels but is manifested in the everyday life of multilingual individuals. As an illustration, we examine multilingualism from the perspective of a young Sami boy, Ante, and explore how different languages function as a complex – but at times problematic – set of resources for him. To capture the complexity and fluidity in the relationships between various languages in his life, we base our theorising on such concepts as ‘linguistic resources’, ‘heteroglossia’ and ‘languaging’. With the help of multimodal data we examine how the linguistic resources present in Ante's daily life…

Clausal coordination in Finnish Sign Language

2016

This paper deals with the coordination of clauses in Finnish Sign Language (FinSL). Building on conversational data, the paper first shows that linking in conjunctive coordination in FinSL is primarily asyndetic, whereas in adversative and disjunctive coordination FinSL prefers syndetic linking. Secondly, the paper investigates the nonmanual prosody of coordination: nonmanual activity is shown both to mark the juncture of the coordinand clauses and to draw their contours. Finally, the paper addresses certain forms of clausal coordination in FinSL that are sign language-specific. It is suggested that the sign language-specific properties of coordination are caused both by the fact that signe…