Essay On Multimodality

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To avoid this narrow cognition of meaning, many fields of studies explore the concept of multimodality and its modes from various perspectives. Thus, there are different approaches that engage in the research of the multimodality defined as “understanding of human meaning making” (ed. Litosseliti, 2010, p. 194). Farther, Rick Iedema (2003) observes that multimodality “provides the means to describe a practice or representation in all its semiotic complexity and richness” (p. 39). Multimodality, at this point, is multidimensional and its modes might be understood differently depending on various planes, like context or situation. Besides, he introduces the very term of resemioticisation. „Resemioticisation is about how meaning making shifts …show more content…

There is a wide range of alternatives which may represent a particular relation, for example a chart with some data or a true-life picture. Similar to interpersonal, the ideational metafunction contains semiotic modes which “offer an array of choices, of different ways in which objects, and their relations to other objects and to processes, can be represented” (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006, p. 42). The semiotic modes are responsible for the representation of an accurate meaning apart from the system in which they are created, that is they have to be understandable in the environment experienced by people. The last requirement – the textual metafunction is about how the text cooperate with other signs in order to create a coherent meaning. Due to the visual grammar, it can be distinguished “different compositional arrangements to allow the realization of different textual meanings” (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006, p. 43). Even an order of those signs and texts is not random. Depending on whether they are on the left, right, up or down, they adopt various