ABSTRACT
This contribution represents a first stage of a research aiming at outlining a systematic model for the account of multimodality from a pragmatic and rhetorical viewpoint. Essential to our approach is the uptake of the need pointed out by Bateman (2008: 21–22) “to overcome the selective blindness that applying a pre-theoretical interpretation of what we think is happening on the page can bring” in order to elaborate a systematic model for the analysis of multimodal documents “that can begin to unravel the mechanisms of multimodal multiplication” (Bateman 2008: 2). Meaning in multimodal texts is not the result of a simple juxtaposition of elements which redundantly present similar meaning in different semiotic modalities, but the result of a function, namely, Lemke’s (1998) multiplication of meaning, from which follows that the combination of modes leads to new meanings rather than simple addition (Bateman 2008: 2).
