Multimodality in Socio-cultural Contexts: To Talk with Pictures, to Understand Pictures

Abstract

The present paper is inspired by the challenges posed by multimodal/multi-semiotic resources in the investigation of communication. We focus on the visual resource as a socially and culturally shaped semiotic resource of making meaning and discuss how images work in different socio-cultural contexts. The interpretative complexity of the notions of ‘culture’ and ‘socio-cultural context’ is explained by looking at images as they represent information from a socio-cultural environment. The theoretical framework of the paper was rooted in Halliday, Kress and Leeuwen’s theory of social semiotics, in the concepts of multimodal communication and text linguistic view of the language-image-link according to Stockl, Schmiz, Sandig, and in Kuse’s discourse sensitive cultural linguistics. The questions under discussion are how we communicate through visual images, and how communicative actors produce and interpret meanings through pictures. We use the multimodal texts from modern German and Russian discourse and discuss the role of the visual image in shaping our socio-cultural experience and knowledge. The paper argues for more sensitivity in respect of the expansion of visual images with regard to multimodal competence. The latter plays a crucial role in exploring the ideological and culturally specific implicatures behind the visual images.