In: Semiotics Theory and Applications ISBN 978-1-61728-992-7
Editor: Steven C. Hamel © 2011 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.
Chapter 12
MULTIMODAL STYLISTICS – THE HAPPY MARRIAGE
OF STYLISTICS AND SEMIOTICS
Nina Nørgaard
Institute of Language and Communication
University of Southern Denmark, DenmarkINTRODUCTION
Stylistics is the systematic study of the ways in which meaning is created by linguistic
means in literature and other types of text. It arose from a wish to make literary criticism
more ―scientific‖ by anchoring the analysis of literature more solidly in the actual grammar
and lexis of the texts put up for analysis. Since the first major flourishing of stylistics in the
1960s, different linguistic paradigms and other academic trends of the times have caused the
field to branch off into a great variety of sub-fields such as formalist stylistics, functionalist
stylistics, cognitive stylistics, corpus stylistics, feminist stylistics and others, which all from
each their perspective pivot around linguistic aspects of meaning-making. Gradually, the
range of text types that stylisticians engage with have furthermore expanded to also comprise
non-fictional texts such as news reports, advertising, doctor-patient discourse, academic
writing, etc. While forceful in its rigour and systematism, the traditional stylistic approach
(whether of a formalist, functionalist, cognitive or other orientation) has until recently largely
failed to embrace meanings which are created by semiotic systems other than the verbal. By
fusing the theories, methodologies and practices of stylistics and multimodal semiotics,
multimodal stylistics is a new direction in the field which aims to develop analytical
frameworks that will allow systematic analysis of literature and other types of text which, in
addition to wording, employ semiotic modes such as e.g. typography, layout, visual images
and colour for their meaning-making. It is the aim of this article to provide a brief
introduction to this new semiotic trend in stylistics, its promises, problems and areas which
need to be explored.