Editorial: Theoretical and Analytical Explorations of Multimodality

The cross-fertilization of linguistics and the study of multimodal communication has now continued for half a century or so, ever since conversation analysts started to explore the interdependencies between verbal (speech) and non-verbal means of face-to-face communication (paralanguage; co-speech gestures, postures, and facial expressions). At more or less the same time, the idea that communication is almost invariably multimodal was also taken up by text analysts, who set out to disentangle the complex relations between text and images in various cultural artefacts (advertisements, comics, fi lms, etc.). In the following decades, the analytical scope of multimodality studies expanded to include explorations of posters, textbooks, picture books, assembly instructions, information graphics, webpages, social media, computer and video games, radio and television broadcasts, corporate logos, graffi ti, performance art, and even medieval textiles. More recently, multimodal analysis has intersected with translation studies, resulting not only in numerous explorations of audiovisual translations of fi lms, television programmes, and live performances (by means of dubbing, subtitling, voice-over, surtitling, etc.) or interlingual translation of comics, but also in research on transformations of narratives across media (e.g., comics to fi lms, novels to comics, video games to fi lms, etc.), theorized as intersemiotic or multimodal translation. While linguistic theory has always informed, as well as benefi tted from, research into multimodal communication, with systemic-functional linguistics and cognitive linguistics arguably providing the most widespread approaches to analysis of multimodal artefacts, multimodality studies has become an increasingly interdisciplinary fi eld of research, interfacing more and more productively not only with linguistics, but also with semiotics, psychology, education, sociology, anthropology, media studies, comics studies, literary theory, fi lm studies, and gender studies. This volume off ers a selection of original studies of multimodality that were presented in their initial form and discussed during the international conference “Theoretical and Analytical Multimodality Studies”, organized by the Department of Translation Studies, Institute of English Studies at the Philological Faculty of