Abstract:
Many writings in the area of multimodal discourse analysis explore the 'grammars'
of different semiotic modes (e.g. O'Toole, 1994; Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996,
2002; van Leeuwen, 1999; Martinec, 1998, 2000, 2001) and this work is by no means completed. Comparisons between the various 'grammars' are especially
needed. We need to know more both about the extent to which different modes
can do the same kind of communicative work and about the extent to which they
differ in their semiotic potential, and we need to know more about the difference
between doing the same kind of communicative work through one mode or
through another. But what is also needed is research on the way different modes
are integrated in multimodal texts.
