Peircean Semiotics and Multimodality: Towards a New Synthesis

Abstract

Abstract The account of signs, signification and meaning set out by the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce around the beginning of the twentieth century is a foundation stone of modern semiotics. In Peirce’s conception, semiotics concerned the process of signification at its most general and was intrinsically multimodal. It is then logical that contemporary multimodal research should engage with the Peircean view of semiotics. This in turn makes it particularly important that better understandings of the potential interconnections between Peircean semiotics and multimodality be achieved. Until now, however, such interconnections have been limited not only with respect to what has been drawn from Peirce’s account but also with respect to the areas of multimodality concerned. To deepen and broaden communication among approaches to multimodality and between those approaches and Peircean semiotics, this article sets out a reading of Peirce’s ‘mature’ 1903 position on semiotics aimed specifically at improving the utility of the account for multimodal analysis. The article argues that a lack of methodological precision within semiotics has led to relatively impoverished and empirically unreliable analyses. A new synthesis between Peirce’s account and multimodality is proposed as a stronger metatheoretical framework both for addressing multimodality and for drawing more from Peirce.