Viewpoint and Multimodal Artifacts

Professor Barbara Dancygier from the University of British Columbia will speak on 23 October 2020.

This talk will be composed of two parts. First, I will outline the approach to viewpoint emergence, as represented in recent publications in cognitive linguistics. Primarily, I will focus on the concepts of viewpoint networks, multiplicity of viewpoint, and viewpoint compression, referring to examples from grammar and discourse. In the main part of the talk, I will discuss the nature of viewpoint in multimodal artifacts. My examples will come from three areas of usage: internet memes, street art, and cityscape (signs, sandwich boards, etc.). These genres provide a clear illustration of the nature of the interaction between image and text, including the ways in which multimodality influences both linguistic choices and visual forms.