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IMAGE AND VISUALITY IN SOCIOCULTURAL DIMENSION // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2021. Issue 2 (28). P. 96-109

The article discusses the challenges and opportunities posed by the visual turn and visual studies in the investigation of communication. The theoretical framework of the article was found in the modern concepts of multimodal communication. The article focuses on the role of a visual image in shaping our sociocultural experience and knowledge. The main research question is as follows: how communicative actors produce and interpret meanings through visual images. Visuality is considered as a semiotic resource of meaning making that is socially constructed and culturally given. The article looks at images as they are context sensitive and represent information from the sociocultural environment. The methodology of the present analysis is in line with social and cultural semiotics, and reflects the main principles of text and cultural linguistics. The findings and implications can be summarized as follows. First, the article sketches out a linguistic, or, to be more precise, text linguistic, view on multimodality and summarizes the main approaches to the visual medium of communication compared with language. The point of departure is a methodological shift within linguistics from logocentrism towards multimodality and visual resources of meaning making. In the research papers in the 2000s, linguists also legitimized the pictorial and multimodal turn. Visuality is now at the cross-point of research interests of many modern disciplines such as text linguistics, stylistics, cognitive linguistics. Multimodal texts are considered a crucial object to investigate the meaning making in its sociocultural embeddedness. Second, the suggested inquiry is in line with the issue of intericonicity and reveals the explanatory charge of visual intertextuality. I show that pictures, image-language links may emerge as rooted in certain sociocultural practices as a part of the cultural knowledge of communicators. That means they may be dependent upon the knowledge of previously encountered texts or meanings. Visual intertextuality is considered a form of intericonicity, which reflects the intersemiotic translation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems. I show visual intertextuality in current Russian communicative practice as a means of meaning making through reference on images or image-language links. A conclusion looks at some requirements and directions for further research. Images may provide a new access point to investigation of the cognitive dimension of meaning making and its sociocultural dimension. They allow us to observe the forms in which socially shaped and shared experience is fixed. The visual resource provides an access to contextualization: images are context sensitive and context embedded. The use and interpretation of images gives a special angle for the active, social construction of reality through semiotic (visual) resources.

Keywords: multimodality, visual intertextuality, intericonicity, sociocultural context

TYPOGRAPHY AS SOCIAL INDEX: SOVIET LANDSCAPE IN THE MODERN RUSSIAN DISCOURSE // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2023. Issue 2 (36). P. 50-73

This paper suggests a focus on the typography and the typographic design of the text. Typography is considered as a semiotic resource with a meaning-making potential. It may act as social index proving links to contexts and social environments in which these links become crucial for social actors. The paper argues that typographic forms reveal ideological ascriptions. These can be discussed as graphic ideologies or ideologies of graphics, which means a set of beliefs about the socially significant meaning of graphic variants. The theoretical and methodological foundations of the analysis are found in the modern investigations in social semiotics, multimodality, social indexicality, and thus are in line with explanatory approaches in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, typographic linguistics. The sociolinguistic theory and typographic linguistics provide a social meaning of visual signs or, in a more narrow sense, typographic meaning. This is a kind of pragmatic meaning, arising from the indexical links of the visual sign to the social context of its use. In this framework, the explanatory charge of the concept of landscape is revealed, which attracted many scholars to denote a multimodal, socially and discursively shaped space, both in the sense of a cultivated environment and also as ideological sites. The notion of landscape involves signs, situation, social actors and ideologies. Therefore, the concepts of semiotic landscape, visual landscape, typographic landscape, which are identified in modern researches, are discussed. The paper shows that typographic landscapes as semiotic products with a social meaning are framed and evaluated in a dynamic way. Typographic meaning is an interpretive phenomenon that derives from the communicative knowledge of interlocutors and is a result of an interactive ascription within a socially embedded practice. The research question is related to the study of how typography becomes, in Agha’s terms, a social emblem. It is investigated in connection with the Soviet landscape in the modern Russian urban context. The term “Soviet landscape” refers to a multimodal space in which various semiotic resources, verbal and visual signs, texts, visual images, symbols refer to the sociocultural practices and (self)identification of a person in the former Soviet society. The main object of the suggested analysis within this framework is the Soviet type, characteristic for the Soviet newspapers and framed as such by social actors in the modern context. The analysis is based on multimodal texts used in modern Russian socio-cultural practice when creating advertising, social, and commercial messages. Dealing with landscapes reveals how Soviet nostalgia and the relevance of Soviet meanings give rise to the social indexicality of the sign and to the typographic meaning as a special social index. The analysis shows that typography has a precedent nature, acts as one of the semiotic tools for meaning making in socio-cultural practice.

Keywords: landscape, multimodality, sociolinguistics, social meaning, Soviet landscape, typographic meaning, typographic linguistics