“Poof! a’m heppily saving the Lord…”: multimodality and evaluative discourses in male toilet graffiti at the University of the Western Cape

Abstract

This paper explores the use of punctuation, capitalisation, linguistic forms and images in the construction of evaluative discourses in male toilet graffiti at the University of the Western Cape. Of particular interest is how male students use these devises in the discursive construction of the appraisal resource of Attitude, Graduation and Evaluation. Using over 150 tokens of graffiti, the paper uses a multimodal approach employing notions of resemiotisation and remediation to show how taboo language, font size, images and sketches are repurposed to aid the evaluation of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ in toilet graffiti. The paper shows that through utilising multimodal texts, graffiti writers are able to reformulate and situate novel meanings in contexts; and in terms of appraisal, the verbal and non-verbal semiotic material are strategically combined to engender novel evaluations.