Agnieszka gave lecture titled “Embedded multimodality: sounds and actions in text-messages?” at the Queen Mary Pre-Sessional English Programme on 23 August 2011. The relevant abstract can be found below:
Embedded multimodality: sounds and actions in text-messages?
Widespread belief, rooted mainly in folk linguistics, that texting as a form of communication offers very limited possibilities, is attributed to its text-only character (cf. Spilioti 2006). Instead of being seen as a rich communicative tool, texting is often seen purely as a linguistic experiment.
In this lecture, I address the underlying assumption that texting is a restricted form of communication and show that, even though mono-modal (i.e., text-only) on the surface, texting demonstrates largely multimodal possibilities, including ways of representing sensory information, e.g., sounds or images, in writing. Rather than being purely mono-modal, it represents “embedded multimodality”, defined as the use of linguistic tools in order to perform multimodal communication within a technologically mono-modal medium.
I concentrate on two main domains within which multimodal communication can be observed in texts: representing sounds and actions in writing. I also point to the emerging grammar of embedded multimodality and the rules that texters follow in making their communication by text-messages multimodal. Finally, I suggest some of the routes along which multimodal elements could have found its way into texting, including transfer between different forms of communication (e.g., similarities with comic strips and animations in instant messaging).
