Between semioses and meanings: proposal for the study of the plurisemiotic text
Textual Linguistics; Eugenio Coseriu; Plurisemiotic Text
This study begins with the observation of linguistic events materially composed of distinct types of semiosis (verbal and non-verbal). Certain approaches, such as multimodal research, have dedicated themselves to analyzing these events, treating them as multimodal texts and employing different tools and categories for verbal and non-verbal materials. For example, categories developed by Textual Linguistics are used for analyzing the verbal component, while categories from visual theory, such as those proposed by Visual Design Grammar, are applied to the non-verbal component. We observe that this theoretical-analytical framework encounters limitations due to the absence of a perspective capable of addressing the hybrid specificity of such phenomena concerning their semiotic materiality. Considering this issue, we propose, based on Eugenio Coseriu's theoretical framework of Textual Linguistics, the establishment of the concept of plurisemiotic text, guided by semiotic relations of distinct natures (verbal and non-verbal). Therefore, the plurisemiotic text is conceived as an act or series of plurisemiotic acts by an individual in a specific situation. The theoretical field associated with this object is Textual Linguistics, retaining the same tasks as the Textual Linguistics originally proposed by Eugenio for verbal texts, while naturally considering the existence of other sign systems. One of these tasks is the description and interpretation of a specific text, i.e., the linguistics of the plurisemiotic text. Given the broad range of plurisemiotic texts, we selected a static cartoon and a comic strip for a preliminary demonstration of this task. In summary, our work argues that the linguistics of text, initially proposed by Eugenio Coseriu based solely on verbal texts, can be expanded conceptually and instrumentally to accommodate plurisemiotic texts.