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Interaction in both institutional and everyday situations involves a range of resources. Apart from verbal means, social behaviour is regulated through various semiotic instruments that contribute to or specify verbally expressed meanings. While there is a vast body of scholarly studies focusing on multimodality in communication, the structure of multimodal texts needs refining. In this chapter, we draw upon public signs and notices to explore how different semiotic resources, such as words, fonts, frames, colours and images cooperate to produce the pragmatic effect of prohibition. We distinguish between the two groups of public signs with respect to the relation they bear to institutional discourse and the semiotic resources employed: public signs that retain the marks of official legal discourse and thus rely predominantly on verbal means; and naive regulators, which are deprived of legal markers and reiterate legal norms through multimodal resources, offering a ready-made version of a social norm. Our findings imply that multimodal resources allow for a combination of legal and commonsensical meanings in everyday interactions.

Communication challenges to the twenty-first century humankind are as serious as materialistic ones. Search for meaning, the ever-present focus of human praxis, has gained new urgency in the current age of diversity and rapid transformations in all social spheres. This chapter is an overview of research on meaning-loaded forms in social interactions presented in the current volume. Modern communicative practices are characterized by a profound change in their shapes and formats: both everyday and institutional communication is becoming increasingly multimodal and digital. These new formats of communication require new approaches that would reveal underlying processes happening in the participants’ cognition.. In their contributions, the authors explore the connection between new communication patterns, technological innovations and underlying cognitive processes in an array of communicative situations in both physical and virtual environments. Recent decades have seen a singularly close integration of verbal and visual semiotic systems, which has become essential for social meaning construction and interpretation. Technological advances bring to the fore the role of digital competency in educational environments, generating intense discussions on the impact of video games, corpus technologies, online projects and other digital pedagogy techniques of effective classroom communication. In their observations on and theoretical implications of the diverse communicative patterns the authors draw on recent advances in neuroscience, genre theory, psychology and psycholinguistics. The volume may provide a point of reference for further discussions of multimodality, digitalization and cognitivity as the phenomena pertaining to the present day communicative and educational contexts.

The study is part of the project aimed at revealing the mechanisms of discursive construction of international relations (IR). It examines the functions of the categories ‘strength’ and ‘weakness’ in discursive representations of states as political actors. The research draws on assumptions of social constructionism and CDA. The data include recent speeches by Russian and Polish Ministers of Foreign Affairs. The paper argues that the opposition ‘strength vs. weakness’ is essential in the construction of IR in discourse. We focus on how nation states and their qualities are represented in foreign policy discourse, and which of these qualities conceptualise the categories of strength and weakness. We demonstrate that the two categories constitute a relational pair; however, the category of strength is expressed more explicitly than that of ‘weakness’, and the axiological charge of ‘strength’ changes depending on the actor that it represents. An array of linguistic tools is employed in constructing the opposition, and, consequentially, the IR between the political actors. The paper suggests that social actors and their qualities can be viewed as social categories that are perpetually constructed and re-constructed in discourse. The research develops the theory of discourse and demonstrates how discourse analysis contributes to the study of social practices and helps interpret current social phenomena.

This paper discusses the mechanisms of discursive construction of Russia’s international relations and intends to identify such mechanisms in the media. Using the framework that is informed by social constructionism and Critical Discourse Analysis, the authors view international relations as a discursive phenomenon, which is constructed through a specific repertoire of pragmalinguistic means. Drawing on the Russian foreign minister’s speech and its representations in Russian newspapers, the authors conduct a case study analysis and reveal that the representations of international relations undergo recontextualisation in the media as compared to the representations in proper diplomatic discourse. The newspapers offer avenues for ideologically charged interpretations through chronotope representations and the strategy of emotionalisation. The media also widen the discursive context of international relations by way of the inclusion of heterogeneous social actors, which are grouped in a way that disc...

This study examines discursive representations of judicial power in Russian print media. The data are drawn from governmental and oppositional newspapers and cover a six-month period during 2013. Using an approach that is informed by Critical Discourse Analysis and a pragma-dialectical perspective on argumentation, the authors distinguish strategies and specific linguistic means as well as argumentation fallacies that journalists employ in the articles to construct the representation which is consistent with a newspaper’s ideology.

The present study explores discursive constructions of us- and them-groups within the context of the debates on the placement of the US anti-ballistic missile defence system in Central and Eastern Europe. The study is based on the data collected by the authors in the Polish and Russian press (2008–2009). Using the framework that is informed by Critical Discourse Analysis and Membership Categorization Analysis, the authors define strategies and specific linguistic means used to represent ‘us’ and ‘them’ and provide a picture of chronological transformations that these representations undergo in the investigated newspapers.