ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we provide a brief account of a social semiotic perspective on multimodality. First, we distinguish social semiotics from more narrow, linguistically informed variants of semiotics. We stress that sign-making is embedded in ‘contexts of situation’ and ‘contexts of culture’, which means that meaning emerges within and for social practices. We also introduce the ‘semiotic system’, where meaning is described in terms of systemic, paradigmatically organized relations of similarity and difference, and we introduce and discuss key terms in such a perspective, specifically metafunctions and stratification. Second, we then return to multimodality from a social semiotic point of view, spelling out the implications of a social semiotic understanding of both mode and multimodality. In particular, we introduce differences between a ‘monomodal’, a ‘polymodal’, and a genuinely ‘multimodal’ perspective. Third, we conclude the chapter by providing some examples of how such perspectives become relevant for organization research.
