32.1451, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Semantics; Sociolinguistics: Thurlow, Dürscheid, Diémoz (2020)
The LINGUIST List
linguist at listserv.linguistlist.org
Mon Apr 26 20:38:13 UTC 2021
LINGUIST List: Vol-32-1451. Mon Apr 26 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 32.1451, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Semantics; Sociolinguistics: Thurlow, Dürscheid, Diémoz (2020)
Moderator: Malgorzata E. Cavar (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Student Moderator: Jeremy Coburn, Lauren Perkins
Managing Editor: Becca Morris
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Everett Green, Sarah Robinson, Nils Hjortnaes, Joshua Sims, Billy Dickson
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
Editor for this issue: Jeremy Coburn <jecoburn at linguistlist.org>
================================================================
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2021 16:37:38
From: Dominique Dias [Dominique.Dias at univ-grenoble-alpes.fr]
Subject: Visualizing Digital Discourse
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36623297
Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/31/31-1216.html
EDITOR: Crispin Thurlow
EDITOR: Christa Dürscheid
EDITOR: Federica Diémoz
TITLE: Visualizing Digital Discourse
SUBTITLE: Interactional, Institutional and Ideological Perspectives
SERIES TITLE: Language and Social Life [LSL]
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2020
REVIEWER: Dominique Dias, Université de Grenoble - Alpes
SUMMARY
This edited volume “Visualizing digital discourse” examines the role of
visuality in digital discourse. The editors, Crispin Thurlow, Christa
Dürscheid and Federica Diémoz explain in the introduction that the volume is
not a conference proceedings, even if it is based on a conference “Visualizing
(in) the Media” from November 2017. The book is organized into 3 parts and 12
chapters, which problematize the concept of visuality and deliver empirical
studies on various visual resources (emojis, videos, photos…). The aim of the
book is therefore to contribute to the field of multimodality research.
After the introduction by the editors and before the beginning of the first
section, Chapter One, which is entitled “Towards an embodied visual semiotics:
Negotiating the right to look” is a so-called ‘flagship’ chapter by Rodney H.
Jones (University of Reading, UK). Indeed this chapter shows in a programmatic
way how the volume wants to define a new approach of visuality. Technologies
and especially mobile digital photography have opened up a new form of visual
semiotics. Analysing visual resources should not be only searching what
pictures mean, but also how the possibility of making images has transformed
the nature of the visual. The author illustrates this paradigmatic change with
livestream videos of police encounters, in which drivers use videos to
communicate their experience of being looked at and claim the right to look as
Mirzoeff (2011) defines it. Referring to what Heidegger (2008) calls
“being-in-the-world” (Dasein) and “being with” other social actors (Mitsein),
Jones defends the idea of an embodied visual semiotics, or in other words
semiotics with social and phenomenological perspectives.
The first section, “Besides words and writing” is composed of three chapters
focusing on emoji, a sign between image and word. Chapter Two, “Emoji
invasion: The semiotic ideologies of language endangerment in multilingual
news discourse” by Crispin Thurlow (University of Bern) and Vanessa Jaroski
(University of Bern) examines the metadiscourse about emoji in a corpus of
articles in English and in French in which journalists talk about emoji. The
authors do not analyse the practices of the users, but how users represent and
talk about emoji. They identify three rhetorical tactics: emoji can appear as
a new language, emoji can be conceptualised as an invasion and emoji can be
seen as a sign of linguistic, cultural and intellectual degradation. This
study explores the concept of semiotic ideology that refers to people’s
assumptions about what signs are and about what they should be. Those beliefs
explain more about speakers and their conception of language than about the
language itself.
In Chapter 3, “Beyond the binary: Emoji as a challenge to the image-word
distinction”, Georg Albert (University of Koblenz-Landau) tries to overcome
the dualistic distinction between images and words in order to define emoji.
He starts reminding that typological definitions of smileys, emoticons, emoji
and kaomoji are often misleading because they mix formal and functional
criteria. At a morphological level, emoji are like logograms (<$>, <&>, <%>),
they are not combined with other graphemes to build meaningful morphemes. But
the function of emoji can not be compared to punctuation marks. Most studies
assume that the principal function of emoji is to express an emotion. Albert
explains that emoji can prototypically fulfil four main functions: to indicate
an utterance’s intended illocutionary force, to structure complex utterances,
to add information about the mode of an utterance and to indicate social
styles or registers. It can also happen that an emoji replaces a word. This
complexity shows that emoji can not be simply classified as words or as
images.
Chapter 4 “Evolving interactional practices of emoji in text messages” by
Rachel Panckhurst (Paul Valéry University of Montpellier) and Francesca
Frontini (Paul Valéry University of Montpellier) is also dedicated to the
usage of emoji. The authors explore the 88milSMS corpus to show if emoji are
more often used to express an emotion (sometimes as softeners) or with a
referential function to replace a word. Three mains situations are identified:
emoji are a redundant addition that expresses the same as the written text,
emoji are a necessary addition that avoids a misinterpretation, emoji replace
a word. The analysis is an attempt at studying emoji in their syntactic
context, observing how emoji and sequences of several emoji are inserted. The
authors underlie the sociolinguistic aspect of emoji and recognise that the
corpus represents a specific social group who has a more innovative use of
emoji.
The second section, “The social life of images” begins with Chapter 5,
“Revisualization of classed motherhood in social media” by Sirpa Leppänen
(University of Jyväskylä). Referring to the concept of recontextualization
(Bauman & Briggs 1990 and Silverstein & Urban 1996), Leppänen defines what she
calls “revisualization” to show how images can be reinserted in a new context.
The article is a case study based on examples from social media blogs in
Finland, and especially Shitty Mother’s Diary, that parodies themes and styles
for representing motherhood in homing blogs. Leppänen explains how by
imitating and creating a contrast between image and text the parodic blog
points out the pervasiveness of discourses about motherhood.
Chapter 6, “Making Let’s plays watchable: An interactional approach to gaming
visualizations” by Axel Schmidt (University of Mannheim) and Konstanze Marx
(University of Greifswald) is devoted to a new genre, the so-called Let’s
Plays videos, in which gamers film their gaming on YouTube and comment at the
same time. The authors analyse how a rather individual activity has become a
platform format and what makes Let’s Plays video watchable for the viewers.
This contribution follows the methodology of Ethnomethodology and Conversation
Analysis (EMCA) to describe how this activity builds a verbal, embodied and
visual meaning that makes the gameplay more comprehensible and attractive for
viewers.
Chapter 7, “Intimacy at a distance: Multimodal meaning making in video chat
tours” by Dorottya Cserzö (Cardiff University) also presents a new genre based
on visuality. Video chat tours are often improvised videos between two or more
persons, on which people describe their new home or their environment. Such
videos use movement and speech to create meaning and are specific because they
try to create intimacy at a distance. Based on the methodology of conversation
analysis, Cserzö points out the fact that the joint attentional frame in video
chat tours is more fragile than in face-to-face communication.
Chapter 8, “Visual bonding and intimacy: A repertoire-oriented study of
photo-sharing in close personal relationships” by Rebecca Venema (Università
della Svizzera italiana) and Katharina Lobinger (Università della Svizzera
italiana) focuses on the role of visuality in interactions between couples and
friends. The authors assume that interactions based on visuality serve, among
other things, to build social relationships, to create social memory and to
express the self. The results of this study show that these practices are
often ritualized. They allow partners to co-experience emotions. As opposed to
written texts and their linear logic, this kind of interaction is experienced
more intuitively.
The third and last section is entitled “Designing multimodal texts” and is
devoted to multimodality. It opens with Chapter 9, “Multimodality and
mediality in an image-centric semiosphere – A rationale” by Hartmut Stöckl
(Salzburg University). This paper assumes that contemporary communication has
been going through a phase of growing image-centricity. Stöckl develops two
specific notions of centricity: centricity in a compositional and perceptual
way and semantical centricity. As far as this definition of centricity, Stöckl
formulates five hypotheses explaining the difference between old mass/print
media and new/social media. This chapter sketches a multimodal research agenda
in order to understand the way new practices change the role and the meaning
of visual resources.
Chapter 10, “Designing ‘good taste’: A social semiotic analysis of corporate
Instagram practices” by Lara Portmann (University of Bern) presents the use of
Instagram by two Swiss supermarket chains, Coop and Migros. Focusing on ten
variables, Portmann analyses how these two chains aestheticize food, selling
to people not only products, but also stories and cultural narratives and
lifestyles. This contribution assumes that visual resources on Instagram
construct the social meaning of food.
Chapter 11, “Diachronic perspectives on viral online genres: From images to
words, from lists to stories” by Jana Pflaeging (Salzburg University) raises
the crucial question of genres. The author presents a diachronic study of a
quite new genre, the listicle, a short-form that uses a list as a structure.
This form tends however to become a storicle, integrating a lot of images and
animated gifts. In addition, the example of listicles shows how the need for
social conviviality between users is commercially exploited by professional
content providers: becoming viral, this kind of genre increases the value of
advertising spaces.
The last chapter, “Social media influencer’s advertising targeted at
teenagers: The multimodal constitution of credibility” by Dorothee Meer
(Ruhr-University Bochum) and Katharina Staubach (Ruhr-University Bochum)
concentrates on what Katheder (2008) calls osmotic advertising. This form of
advertising consists in unmarked product placement. In this contribution, the
authors analyse Dagi Bee’s channel, a German YouTube star, who shares make-up
tutorials with teenagers. This article examines how credibility is based on
the illusion of authenticity: the beauty expert seems to be a normal teenager
in her room, and the video generates the impression that influencer and viewer
are co-present and share the same space.
EVALUATION
This volume presents a new approach to studying visuality in discourse,
successfully bringing together the work of language and communication
scholars. One of the strongest features of this book is that it considers
visual resources not only as a sign to decode but also as a sign in
interaction with other verbal signs. The structure of the book is coherent and
allows the authors to introduce various aspects of visual resources such as
the status of the image as a sign (Section 1), the social role of visuality
(Section 2) and the evolution of genres and practices (Section 3). Considering
this, the volume is very useful for scholars interested in multimodality and
visual studies.
In the first section, the definition of emoji from an article to another may
seem inconsistent at first sight. As opposed to Chapter 4, Chapter 3 does not
differentiate between emoji, smileys and emoticon. Chapter 4 considers
emoticon as a punctuation mark and emoji as the expression of a feeling. In
addition to that, the functions of emoji are differently considered in those
two chapters. Chapter 3 identifies more functions than Chapter 4, that only
sees the emotional dimension of emoji. These differences show that emoji and
their variable status between word and image are still a challenge to studies
in multimodality.
One of the merits of the book is to offer a new approach to visual resources.
Yet, the methods that are used are often used for conversation analysis, which
is understandable. To examine genres like video chat tours or make-up
tutorials, they tend indeed to reconfigure the rules of face-to-face
communication. Chapter 9 by Stöckl is one of the main advances from a
methodological perspective. Then it lays the basic foundation for a new method
of visual semiotics that is not only based on conversation analysis but also
considers visuality in a larger context. Referring to Lotman’s concept of
semiosphere (Lotman 1990), Stöckl (see also Stöckl 2020) suggests to examine
the whole of a community’s semiotic modes, genre repertoires and media.
The other merit of the book is to explore new genres like video chat tours
(Chapter 7), listicles (Chapter 11), Let’s Plays (Chapter 6) or make-up
tutorials (Chapter 12). These very different genres have yet something in
common. They allow readers to understand how communication practices are
changing and how the role of visual resources in their embodied and affective
dimensions implies a recreation and reconfiguration of social meaning.
REFERENCES
Bauman, Richard & Charles L. Briggs. 1990. Poetics and performance as critical
perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19. 59
88.
Heidegger, Martin. 2008. Being and time, Reprint edition. New York: Harper
Perennial Modern Classics.
Katheder, Doris. 2008. Mädchenbilder in deutschen Jugendzeitschriften der
Gegenwart. Beiträge zur Medienpädagogik. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für
Sozialwissenschaften.
Lotman, Yuri. 1990. Über die Semiosphäre. Zeitschrift für Semiotik 12(4). 287
305.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2011. The right to look: A counterhistory of visuality.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books.
Silverstein, Michael & Greg Urban (eds.). 1996. Natural Histories of
Discourse. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Stöckl, Hartmut. 2020. Image-Centricity – When visuals take centre stage.
Analyses and interpretations of a current (news) media practice. In Hartmut,
Stöckl, Helen Caple & Jana Pflaeging (eds.), Shifts toward image-centricity in
contemporary multimodal practices. New York: Routledge. 19 41.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Dominique Dias teaches Germanic Linguistics at the Université Grenoble Alpes,
France. He is a member of the research group ILCEA4, which deals with foreign
cultures and languages. His research interests lie in text linguistics, text
genres, metadiscourses and German media.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*************************** LINGUIST List Support ***************************
The 2020 Fund Drive is under way! Please visit https://funddrive.linguistlist.org
to find out how to donate and check how your university, country or discipline
ranks in the fund drive challenges. Or go directly to the donation site:
https://crowdfunding.iu.edu/the-linguist-list
Let's make this a short fund drive!
Please feel free to share the link to our campaign:
https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-32-1451
----------------------------------------------------------
More information about the LINGUIST
mailing list