Modal Interaction in Interfaith Dialogue: a semiotic study

Abstract

Linguistic studies, accounting for the communication of meaning within texts, faced challenges arising from the consideration of semiotic modes other than language, in interaction with each other and with language – such as gesture, gaze, dress, visual and aural art, image-text relation, page-layout, etc. This increased the need for studying language in interaction with other modes. Therefore, there has been a focus on multimodality in an attempt to make the point that investigating representational modes other than language is essential and central to actual forms of communication everywhere, not simply some kind of marginal concern. Accordingly, in this endeavor, the interaction among modes, specifically language and gestures, is investigated to present an answer to the main questions underlying this research concerning whether meaning is construable through the analysis of one semiotic mode only or there is a need to investigate other accompanying modes. Another question is related to the distribution of semiotic labor among the co-deployed modes within the same multimodal text, whether it is equal or not.