Multimodal Stylistics – The Happy Marriage of Stylistics and Semiotics 257differentiated) and low if monochrome (e.g. greyscale). The use of modality in explicitly
multisemiotic novels is preliminarily explored by Nørgaard (2010b; 2010c fc.).
Another recent take on multimodal stylistics is the approach which combines work in
cognitive stylistics with cognitively informed work on multimodality by scholars such as
Forceville (1996), Forceville and Urios-Aparisi (2009) and Currie (2004). The applicability of
cognitive multimodal frameworks in stylistics is explored by multimodal stylisticians like
Montoro (2010) and Gibbons (2010).
PROMISES, PROBLEMS AND FURTHER PERSPECTIVES
One advantage of combining stylistic and multisemiotic approaches to meaning-making
concerns the consequent stylistic acknowledgement of and interest in all the semiotic modes
that go into the meaning-making of a particular text as well as the pronounced focus on the
meaning which is created by the interaction of the modes involved rather than by modes in
relative isolation. In the field of literary stylistics, such an approach not only enables more
comprehensive analyses of explicitly multisemiotic literary texts, whose numbers are
currently on the increase because of the new affordances of the technologies employed in
publishing. It also invites the stylistician to recognise that even the visually most conventional
literary texts are multimodal, since such texts always and without exception involve the
modes of wording, typography, colour and layout. A multimodal stylistic approach to
literature furthermore enables the stylistician to analytically extend the concept of the ̳text‘
and, for example, acknowledge that elements such as the paper quality and the book cover
ultimately also play a role in the meaning created by a given novel. Finally, the multimodal
semiotic extension of stylistic practices also paves the way for more comprehensive
multimodal stylistic analyses of genres such as film and drama, where the traditional stylistic
analysis of verbal language can be combined with equally systematic observations about the
other semiotic modes involved in the meaning-making of such texts (cf. e.g. Simpson and
Montgomery, 1995; McIntyre, 2008; Montoro, 2010).
Although the fusion of stylistics and multimodal semiotics seems promising in many
respects, the enterprise has its problems, too. One of these is the possible risk for multimodal
stylistics of inheriting some of the weaknesses from the paradigm of multimodality which is
still fairly young and in need of qualification. An example of this concerns the application in
multimodal theory of linguistic categories and descriptive apparatus to semiotic modes which
in some respects differ significantly form the verbal. In some cases, this transfer of concepts
and categories appears to work well, yet in others it seems more problematic, as when
Halliday‘s experiential categories are transferred with little critical reflection from the
description of verbal language to the analysis of visual communication as done, for example,
by Machin (2007: 123-128). In verbal communication, Halliday (1994: 106-175) argues, we
represent – or rather construct or construe – the experiential world in terms of linguistic
configurations of participants, processes and circumstances. The processes and their
associated participants are categorised according to their semantic content and Halliday is
operating with six categories of which the following four are the most prevalent: material
processes of doing, mental processes of cognition, affection and perception, verbal processes
of saying and signifying and relational processes of being. While such processes are fairly