Memorial Plaques in Multimodal Urban Discourse: A Visual Narrative Reflecting Moscow’s Glorious past

Abstract

This article discusses the potential of memorial plaques to be a means of transmitting collective city memories—understood to include the depersonalized spatially motivated commemoration of events and people. The study analyzes such plaques as location-attached material testaments of Moscow’s most outstanding historic and cultural phenomena. Memorial plaques are examined within the city’s semiotic framework and treated as multimodal units communicating socially and locationally relevant information that gets encoded, both verbally and visually. Findings suggest that the key strategy of conveying a collective city memory relies primarily on a combined memorial data objectification model that employs both a verbal code and non-verbal iconic and symbolic elements.