Elisabetta Adami

University of Leeds · School of Languages, Cultures and Societies

Our contemporary reality has given rise to new forms and styles of interaction. Human beings face the challenge of coming to terms with globalisation, hybridity, transnational circulation of practices and people, and the development of virtual spaces on the one hand and, on the other hand, with new kinds of borders arising out of these processes as...

Our aim in the volume has been to present diverse and complex approaches to studying how interactants engage in the process of intercultural communication by orchestrating different resources multimodally. We have presented a range of approaches identifying threads of common ground and points of mutual contamination and enrichment among them. This...

Gunther Kress’s multimodal and social semiotic theory of communication has moved beyond the realm of linguistics, which originally framed his work, and has reached out to inform other fields, such as those of education, museum studies, as well as the humanities and social sciences more broadly. This article brings together our insights in relation...

The chapter presents the results of a participatory analysis conducted in the collaborative research initiative PanMeMic: Communication and Interaction in the Pandemic and beyond. The analysis focuses on a sample of exchanges that took place on the PanMeMic social media spaces. Designed to understand the dynamics of sharing and co-constructing semi...

This paper critically analyses the meaning and use of translanguaging as an inclusive pedagogical strategy in the context of a bilingual deaf education classroom where there are asymmetrical sensorial experiences of being deaf and being hearing, and different access to ‘codified’ (either speech or sign-language) resources. The pedagogical opportuni...

This manifesto stems from a transmedia initiative for collective research designed to shape-from the bottom-up-a socially responsive and responsible culture of inquiry, in observing, recording, sharing and reflecting on the changes to communication and interaction caused by the COVID-19 crisis and their enduring effects post-pandemic. The objective...

This manifesto stems from a transmedia initiative for collective research designed to shape-from the bottom-up-a socially responsive and responsible culture of inquiry, in observing, recording, sharing and reflecting on the changes to communication and interaction caused by the COVID-19 crisis and their enduring effects post-pandemic. The objective...

Translation Studies, traditionally focused on the verbal, has recently turned to the field of Multimodal Studies for adequate methodologies and analytical frameworks that can ground research on the translation of multimodal texts such as films, websites or comics. Analytical tools and concepts developed within the area of multimodality have been im...

The Common Framework of Reference for Intercultural Digital Literacies applies a set of guidelines modelled on CEFR and DigComp2.0, by providing precise indications about what one can do at each level (e.g. design a blog, understand how content is organized in a web page, produce a video curriculum, etc. designed specifically to communicate with an...

Interaction between deaf and hearing interlocutors is examined to demonstrate how understanding (and misunderstanding) can be expressed and inspected through the situated use of multimodal resources. In this communicative situation participants have asymmetrical experiences of being deaf and being hearing and ‘codified’ (either speech or sign-langu...

Background In 2011 there was a strengthening of European Union (EU) legislation on the licencing of herbal products which, in the UK, resulted in the introduction of the Traditional Herbal Registration (THR) scheme. This scheme sets out standards for the safety and quality of herbal medicines and includes the provision of information to the custome...

The chapter aims to sketch a joint semiotic/translation research agenda, to develop understanding of meaning-making practices and translation needs in a changed, increasingly transnational and manifestly multimodal communicative landscape. Initially, by revising foundational tenets of Social Semiotic multimodal research, the chapter redefines notio...

The chapter attempts to show how social semiotic multimodal analysis can contribute to understanding the social dynamics beyond, and reflected by, the regulatory practices shaping the aesthetics of the visual landscapes of our public spaces. It will do so by examining the case of Kirkgate Market, in Leeds (UK), focusing on the changes in signmaking...

This book is the beginning of a conversation across Social Semiotics, Translanguaging, Complexity Theory and Radical Sociolinguistics. In its explorations of meaning, multimodality, communication and emerging language practices, the book includes theoretical and empirical chapters that move toward an understanding of communication in its dynamic co...

The paper presents a social semiotic approach to vernacular sign-making in place, by examining the visual landscape of Leeds Kirkgate Market, as an example of a semiotically-unregulated place. Traders have ample freedom of self-expression and agency in shaping their stalls through all visual-material resources (beyond mere signage, as analysed in l...

How do people use semiotic resources to communicate when they share little cultural and linguistic background? Works on language and superdiversity, translanguaging, polylanguaging and metrolingualism have increasingly acknowledged the multimodality of communication ; yet the potential of a social semiotic multimodal approach for understanding supe...

Testing on digital semiotic production the concepts of (self-)styling and technologization of discourse, developed for offline linguistic phenomena, the article investigates the role of digital platforms in shaping the relation between self-expression online, semiotic regulation and the social construction of taste. By focusing on the use of semiot...

This book is the beginning of a conversation across Social Semiotics, Translanguaging, Complexity Theory and Radical Sociolinguistics. In its explorations of meaning, multimodality, communication and emerging language practices, the book includes theoretical and empirical chapters that move toward an understanding of communication in its dynamic co...

In recent years, social science research in superdiversity has questioned notions such as multiculturalism and pluralism, which hinge on and de facto reproduce ideological constructs such as separate and clearly identifiable national cultures and ethnic identities; research in language and superdiversity, in translanguaging, polylanguaging and metr...

The chapter reviews the growing field of multimodality in relation to the study of language, text and society. It introduces the concept of multimodality as an increasingly visible phenomenon of communication and it traces the developments of multimodality as a field of research, along with the extant theoretical approaches to multimodal analysis....

The Introduction to the Special Issue is available at: http://vcj.sagepub.com/content/15/3/263.full

Chapter to appear in O. Garcìa, N. Flores and M. Spotti (2016) Oxford Handbook of Language and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press The chapter reviews the growing field of multimodality in relation to the study of language, text and society. It introduces the concept of multimodality as an increasingly visible phenomenon of communication and i...

The paper focuses on crossposting, as a form of digital remediation consisting in the production and distribution of multimodal texts in multiple online spaces through embedding and sharing. The study sketches the analytical steps to approach the phenomenon, applying them on a UK food blogger’s activity spanning her blog, her Facebook, Twitter, You...

Aiming to trace emerging conventions in video interaction, the paper adopts Kress's (2010) notions of prompt and response to examine how video responses relate to one of YouTube "Most Responded videos." In the interactants' creative use of the video response option, which affords multimodal text production through copy and paste, any implicit or ex...

This article presents a social semiotic framework for the multimodal analysis of website interactivity. Distinguishing it from interaction, it defines interactivity as the affordance of a text of being acted (up)on, thus including hypertextuality. The author introduces the notion of ‘interactive sites/signs’ as the loci of interactivity in digital...

In this chapter we discuss the impact of digital technologies on notions of literacy and critically explore literacy as normally understood by school curricula (as developing reading, writing and spelling) in relation to ‘new literacies’ (relating to the production and reception of digital and multimodal artefacts and representations as social and...

By examining contemporary changes in the mechanisms and practices of representation and communication, this paper focuses on the copy-and-paste affordance fostered by mobile technologies and digital technologies at large. Its widespread use is affecting radically (1) the acceptability standards of (in)coherent patterns of text production, and (2) t...

By examining contemporary changes in the mechanisms and practices of representation and communication, this paper focuses on the copy-and-paste affordance fostered by mobile technologies and digital technologies at large. Its widespread use is affecting radically (1) the acceptability standards of (in)coherent patterns of text production, and (2) t...

The paper discusses the effects of copy-and-paste on the rhetoric and politics of communication in digital environments, by examining direct and indirect (mis)quotation and referencing in YouTube video-exchanges and by providing further examples in one-to-one communication via Facebook and email. The forwarding of (snippets of) artefacts in new con...

Responding to ‘In defence of writing’ by Håvard Skaar, published in issue 43.1 of this journal (April 2009), the present article argues that (1) compared with text production ‘from scratch’, producing texts through copy-and-paste requires a different type of – rather than less – semiotic work, and that (2) digitally produced writing may involve the...

As with television and computers before it, today's mobile technology challenges educators to respond and ensure their work is relevant to students. What's changed is that this portable, cross-contextual way of engaging with the world is driving a more proactive approach to learning on the part of young people. The first full-length authored treatm...

On the video-sharing website YouTube, the ‘video response’ option triggers a new interaction practice, i.e. communication threads started by an initial video, built up by video responses and resumed by a video-summary. This article examines a video-thread that starts from one of YouTube’s ‘most responded’ videos; by using a social semiotic multimod...

This thesis investigates the interaction by means of videos on YouTube.Video-interaction is a new form of communication which has been taking place on YouTube since May 2006 thanks to the introduction of the ‘video response’ option. The functionality enables (You)Tubers to reply to any given video by means of another video; hence whole communicatio...

After a brief review of the existing literature, this paper investigates the use of generic pronouns in the academic written sections of several corpora of English, namely, (a) the so-called 'Brown Family' of the ICAME collection, (b) six components of the International Corpus of English, (c) the British National Corpus and (d) the current extent o...

We survey a set of syntactic configurations resulting from the modalisation of the mental verbs know, see and think in different varieties of English. The patterns are identified as falling within two discourse functions expressing intersubjectivity: (a) recognising the other without taking over and (b) acknowledging the other without giving in. In...