ABSTRACT
The chapter defines a ‘semiotic landscape’ as comprising the range of semiotic means of expression available in a given society, together with the ways in which they are used and valued. It argues that, historically, the visual and the verbal started out as separate and independent modes of meaning-making, but that the visual was then subsumed by alphabetic writing, with the result that the representational potential of the visual itself declined. The chapter then uses historical and textual evidence to argue that, today, visuality is becoming central again, though often needing speech for its completion, for instance in forms of multimodal writing such as tables, diagrams and PowerPoint slides. It also argues that language and the visual have distinct representational logics. Finally, the chapter explains the book’s multidisciplinary approach and the way it draws on the semiotic underpinnings of Halliday’s linguistic theory, rather than taking a more detailed linguistic approach.
