Multilingualism from Manuscript to 3D

Book excerpt: This collection explores the links between multimodality and multilingualism, charting the interplay between languages, channels and forms of communication in multilingual written texts from historical manuscripts through to the new media of today and the non-verbal associations they evoke. The volume argues that features of written texts such as graphics, layout, boundary marking and typography are inseparable from verbal content. Taken together, the chapters adopt a systematic historical perspective to investigate this interplay over time and highlight the ways in which the two disciplines might further inform one another in the future as new technologies emerge. The first half of the volume considers texts where semiotic resources are the sites of modes, where multiple linguistic codes interact on the page and generate extralinguistic associations through visual features and spatial organizaisation. The second half of the book looks at texts where this interface occurs not in the text but rather in the cultural practices involved in social materiality and text transmission. Enhancing our understandings of multimodal resources in both historical and contemporary communication, this book will be of interest to scholars in multimodality, multilingualism, historical communication, discourse analysis and cultural studies. Chapters 1, 4, and 5 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. Chapters 1 & 4 have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license, with Chapter 5 being made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.