How can multimodality mature into a robust scholarly discipline? A cognitivist's perspective

Further developing multimodality into a respectable discipline requires that its advocates agree about central concepts and about how these concepts must or can be applied to data. Hitherto, multimodality scholarship has been dominated by Social Semiotics, building on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). While this approach has spawned many interesting and useful ideas, it also has serious limitations, and has by and large ignored cognitivist perspectives on multimodality. Since other, older disciplines within the humanities (such as visual art, film, opera, comics & graphic novels), and some in the social sciences (such as mass-communication and anthropology) have long studied phenomena that would nowadays be labelled “multimodal,” greater agreement about key issues would also help make clear how multimodality can both enrich and benefit from these other disciplines. This paper presents eight theses aiming to spawn discussion that will further help establish multimodality as a robust academic discipline.