ABSTRACT
The purpose of the present paper is to contribute to the field of multimodality by proposing a novel approach to the study of meaning transformations in multisemiotic texts. Some illustrative examples of such transformations are cover songs, samplings in hip-hop songs, a remake of a classic movie or recurrent usages of particular motives such as baby photos or famous paintings. The text that serves as a point of departure has usually acquired an iconic status in a society or within particular social groups. The change of meaning is based on a use of the original text or its parts in a new context. By ‘context’ we mean here both a textual environment (or co-text) in which new texts occur and a social setting. Therefore, in order to explore meaning transformation of multimodal texts we need to focus on these two types of contexts. Due to space restrictions, the present paper will deal only with the first type of context. I suggest that the most suitable way to examine the occurrences of a text or its specific elements in new co-texts is by using the corpus methodology. By analysing the elements in a corpus we reveal typical textual contexts in which a text is used. Corpus linguistics provides a set of categories that make such analyses possible. I will introduce them in the next section.
