No abstract

This article explores from a multimodal perspective the extent to which the visual aspect of printed verbal language is meaning‐making in its own right, and how it interacts with other modes of meaning in a complex process of semiosis. To this end, the article deploys and examines the approach to multimodal discourse proposed, for instance, by Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001) and Baldry and Thibault (2006), and, more specifically, the multimodal approach to typography suggested by Van Leeuwen (2005b; 2006), in order to sketch out a methodological framework applicable to the description and analysis of the semiotic potential of typography in literary texts.

No abstract

This article examines the use of negative polarity as a stylistic device in James Joyce's short story, “Two Gallants” (1992 [1914]). The article begins with a brief account of various approaches to negative polarity, focusing in particular on theoretical paradigms that favour the pragmatic functions of negative constructions in context. After this theoretical overview, the various approaches are applied to an analysis of Joyce's story, in the course of which it is demonstrated that although negatives are not a salient feature of the text they are nevertheless a significant meaning-making resource worth considering in analyses of literature. In particular the article aims to demonstrate how the linguistic theory of polyphony known as ScaPoLine would be a useful tool for those who wish to understand and describe the various voices that are coded by negatives and the way negative polarity is, accordingly, at times intimately connected to focalisation and narrative perspective.

Since its first major flourishing in the 1960s, stylistics has developed into a broad and robust field of research, focusing, initially, on the way meaning is created through language in literature, and later also on linguistic meaning-making in other types of texts. Over the years, the field has branched out into a number of specialised sub-fields which have been inspired and informed by different trends in modern linguistics: functionalist stylistics, pragmatic stylistics, cognitive stylistics and corpus stylistics, to name a few. Other branches like feminist stylistics and critical stylistics devote their attention more to contextual matters such as the linguistic manifestation of gender relations, power structures and ideology in text. Central to all these branches of stylistics are the focus on how meaning is created by linguistic means and the consequent attempt to conduct systematic, informed and consistent linguistic analyses of the texts put up for scrutiny.In the self-image of stylistics, a popular metaphor often employed is that of the stylistic tool box, or tool kit, consisting of linguistic terms, concepts and methodologies ready to be employed for stylistic analysis. Along with developments in modern linguistics and the consequent budding of new stylistic sub-branches, the tool kit has been extended with tools pertaining to these new linguistic and stylistic paradigms. While the stylistic tool kit thus contains a wide variety of descriptive and analytical tools available to those who wish to anchor their textual analysis solidly in the actual wording of the text, the tool kit is rather poorly equipped when it comes to handling texts which -in addition to wording -make use of other semiotic modes for their meaning-making. Because stylisticians have overwhelmingly looked to linguistics for their concepts, and because linguistics has been methodologically quite weak at handling multimodal texts, stylistics has inevitably, following suit, been equally weak. Multimodal stylistics is a very recent development in stylistics which addresses exactly this problem. By bringing together literary studies, linguistics and multimodal semiotics, multimodal stylisticians wish to develop a framework for the analysis of modes like typography, layout, colour and visual im-