Abstract:

Almost 25 years ago Gunther Kress, Regina Leite-Garcia and Theo van Leeuwen observed that the “semiotic landscape”, understood as “the communicational and representational landscape” of texts surrounding people had changed (1997: 257). This alteration refers not only to the coexistence of various modes of communication in different types of messages, but also to the decreasing role of verbal language, which is no longer perceived as the main tool of communication. Even though, as Kress, Leite-Garcia and van Leeuwen (1997: 258) observe, the issue of multimodality understood as the coexistence of different modes in a single text is by no means new, and the presence of, for example, the visual aspect has always been observed in relation to verbal language transcribed in different forms and with the application of different materials, the issue of multimodality is still a developing field in the sphere of scientific research. Insofar as a definition of text from the point of view of multimodality differs from the traditional one that characterized texts as consisting of words and sentences only, multimodal texts include phenomena such as “films, ballet performances, happenings, pieces of music, ceremonies, or circus acts” (Nöth 1995: 331) and many other examples, including genres related to the sphere of online communication.