ABSTRACT
With a few notable exceptions to which I will return below, most discussions of multimodal analyses and multimodal meaning-making still proceed without an explicit consideration of just what the ‘mode’ of multimodality is referring to. Two common assumptions contribute to this. First, it may be assumed that the modalities under investigation are unproblematic and self-evident: e.g. ‘language’, ‘graphics’, ‘music’ are clearly distinct modalities, and so there is little need to labour the division; second, it may be assumed that semiotic modalities naturally align with sensory modalities and so visual, auditory, tactile, etc, information are clearly distinct. These assumptions can be both held separately or combined in various ways and are prevalent in both technological (e.g. theory and design of human-computer interfaces: Bordegoni et al. 1997; Oviatt 1999; Wahlster 2006) and non-technological (linguistic, cognitive, semiotic, etc) approaches to multimodality.
