Drawing on his background as a linguist, O'Toole analyses in detail a number of major works of art to show how the semiotic approach relates a work's immediate impact to other aspects of our response to it: to the scene portrayed, to the social, intellectual and economic world within which the artist and his or her patrons worked, and to our own world. It further provides ways of talking about and interrelating aspects of composition, technique and the material qualities of the work.

Examines the effects of colonialism and independence on modern Arab autobiography written in Arabic, English and French.

Volume 2 treats, in great detail and, at times quite innovatively, the individual stages of development of the study of language as an autonomous discipline, from the growing awareness in 17th and 18th century Europe of genetic relationships among a host of languages to the establishment of comparative-historical Indo-European linguistics in the 19th century, from the generation of the Schlegels, Bopp, Rask, and Grimm to the Neogrammarians and the application of the comparative method to non-Indo-European languages from all over the globe. Typological linguistic interests, first synthesized by Humboldt, as well as the development of various other non-historical endeavours in the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, such as language and psychology, semantics, phonetics, and dialectology, receive ample attention.

Ideas for activities covering the teaching of spelling, grammar, punctuation, comprehension, and composition. Also includes suggestions for using art to teach and display these topics.

This volume develops a new multimodal semiotic approach to the study of communication, examining how multimodal discourse is construed transmedially and interculturally and how new technologies and cultural stances inform communicative contexts across the world. It contributes to current theoretical debates in the disciplines of semiotics, linguistics, multimodality, and pragmatics, as well as those aspects of pedagogy and film studies that engage with the notions of text and narrative by addressing questions such as: How do we study multimedia communication? How do we incorporate the impact of new media technologies into the study of Linguistics and Semiotics? How do we construe culture in modern communication? How useful are the current multidisciplinary approaches to multimodal communication? Through the analysis of specific case studies that are developed within diverse academic disciplines and which draw on a range of theoretical frameworks, the goal of this book is to provide a basis for an overarching framework that can be applied by scholars and students with different academic and cultural backgrounds.

This collection explores the mediation of a wide range of processes, texts, and practices in contemporary digital environments through the lens of a multimodal theory of communication. Bringing together contributions from renowned scholars in the field, the book builds on the notion that any form of digital communication inherently presents a rich combination of different semiotic modes and resources as a jumping-off point from which to critically reflect on digital mediation from three different perspectives. The first section looks at social and semiotic practices and the implications of their mediation on artistic production, cultural heritage, and commerce. The second part of the volume focuses on dynamics of awareness, cognition, and identity formation in participants to digitally-mediated communicative processes. The book’s final section considers the impact of mediation on shaping new and different types of textualities and genres in digital spaces. The book will be of particular interest to scholars, researchers and students in multimodality, digital communication, social semiotics, and media studies.