As its general aim, this paper calls for a semiotic turn or a paradigm shift from concentration on verbal English to interaction between visual and verbal English in English Studies. Specially, within a theoretical fr...As its general aim, this paper calls for a semiotic turn or a paradigm shift from concentration on verbal English to interaction between visual and verbal English in English Studies. Specially, within a theoretical framework of multimodal social semiotics, the present paper illustrates what visual English is, examines how it represents and communicates meaning as a semiotic resource system, and identifies some characteristic features of visual English through an itemised, theoretically informed analysis of five advertisements as embodiments of visual English.The focus of this paper is interpretation of the socially coded meanings represented by those advertisements through a text-image interaction in a semiotically-based interdisciplinary approach. Furthermore, it explores if there is any paradigmatic and/or syntagmatic markedness in those target advertisements, and discusses the visual as well as stylistic effects of any such markedness detected. On this basis, this paper generalises about some patterns of multimodal representation in the use of visual English, and briefly charts future directions for further semiotic research on visual English.展开更多
文摘As its general aim, this paper calls for a semiotic turn or a paradigm shift from concentration on verbal English to interaction between visual and verbal English in English Studies. Specially, within a theoretical framework of multimodal social semiotics, the present paper illustrates what visual English is, examines how it represents and communicates meaning as a semiotic resource system, and identifies some characteristic features of visual English through an itemised, theoretically informed analysis of five advertisements as embodiments of visual English.The focus of this paper is interpretation of the socially coded meanings represented by those advertisements through a text-image interaction in a semiotically-based interdisciplinary approach. Furthermore, it explores if there is any paradigmatic and/or syntagmatic markedness in those target advertisements, and discusses the visual as well as stylistic effects of any such markedness detected. On this basis, this paper generalises about some patterns of multimodal representation in the use of visual English, and briefly charts future directions for further semiotic research on visual English.
