Approaching Digital Interfaces, Social Media and Multimodality from the French Context

This collection advances research on multimodality in digital communication with a focus on social media in the French context.

The volume brings together perspectives from scholars across disciplines toward bridging social semiotics, as informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics, with French linguistics and discourse analysis, using examples from digital communication as a focal point. Chapters explore different genres and communicative modes, from online scientific writing to video games to news reporting, as well as different multimodal configurations, from text/image and speech/gesture to emergent digital repertoires such as emoji, avatars, and memes. The volume additionally offers insights into the online multimodal construal of hallmarks of French society and culture. Taken together, the book offers a window into the wide body of French linguistic scholarship that has otherwise been little seen in the English language market, while also bringing social semiotic theory, little known in the French context, into the spotlight.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars in multimodality, digital communication, semiotics, discourse analysis, and media and cultural studies.