Eija Ventola, Cassily Charles, & Martin Kaltenbacher
(eds.), Perspectives on multimodality. (Document Design Companion
Series.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 2004. Pp. x, 250.
Hb eur. 95.00/$114.00.
This sixth volume in the Document Design Companion Series, like its
predecessors, is devoted to issues of written, spoken, and visual
(electronic) discourse as a contextual undertaking. While other volumes
have roots in social semiotics, this one is unique for the breadth of its
multimodal curiosity. Its cross-section of essays emerged from discussions
that took place during the First International Symposium on Multimodal
Discourse at the University of Salzburg. The symposium's organizers,
who are also this book's editors, hope their work will foster
discussion encompassing theory, method, and an eclectic array of
applications, from the multisemiotic construction of mathematics to
visual/verbal humor in comics. From their point of view, this work
suggests possibilities for future study rather than fully realized
principles in a field where nonlinguistic meaning making is only beginning
to be incorporated into linguistic analysis. Therefore, one can often
forgive the uneven nature of this undertaking. Stronger concerns arise
when problematic or missing information affects a central claim.