Script-switching in Japanese pop culture: a social semiotic multimodal approach

Abstract

This article explores the nature of multimodal meaning-making in writing by analyzing the script-switching used in Japanese pop culture. Japanese intermixes multiple script systems in one text. Although official and public documents follow standard orthographic conventions, creative works in pop culture texts freely and regularly break these norms by switching script types to create new meanings. However, while many previous works recognize the semiotic effects of script-switching, to this day, there is no systematic account for how and why such meaning-making operates. Notably, script-switching triggers meanings independent of linguistic meaning. Yet, scripts are a visual manifestation of language, so one cannot say they are independent of language. Accordingly, this work attempts to resolve this dilemma by exploring a social semiotic multimodal approach (see Van Leeuwen ‘Typographic meaning’, 2005, and ‘Towards a semiotics of typography’, 2006, and Stöckl ‘Typography: Body and dress of a text’, 2005), which claims the semiotic independence of typography and its interdependency with language. By recognizing the basic unit of the writing system as graphemes, the author argues that the Japanese script systems are categorized into four types of graphemes depending on the linguistic unit they relate to and she demonstrates how the visual unit of the grapheme and the linguistic unit interact in meaning-making. In this analysis, script-switching occurs when grapheme types are intentionally changed to foreground a visual meaning associated with each script system. This article shows that such a meaning reflects the historical development and discursive social practices of writing with multiple script systems throughout the history of the Japanese writing system.