T Van Leeuwen
Biographic Data
| ID | 13016 |
|---|---|
| NAME | T Van Leeuwen |
| GIVEN NAMES | T |
| FAMILY NAME | Van Leeuwen |
| SIGNATURE | VAN LEEUWEN T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Southern Denmark |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2163-8700 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 80 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1352 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 80 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Iedema, Rick
Rick Iedema (1954– ) is a discourse analyst and semiotician whose work in health communication, organization studies, and organizational semiotics has made important and innovative contributions to discourse analysis and social semiotics as well as to the fields with which his research has been primarily occupied.
Multimodality and Software
In its broadest sense, the term “software” contrasts to “hardware” and applies to any computer features that cannot be physically manipulated. This includes features invisible to the average computer user such as algorithms, text files written by programmers in source code, and their translations into computer‐executable, binary, code.
Playing to Learn: Exploring Interactivity for Knowledge Building in School Science Animations
Commercialising education – A multimodal analysis
This paper investigates a set of interactive resources for mining and energy education produced by the Australian mining industry and endorsed by Australia's Education Department. Building on Eaton, E., & Day, N. (2020. Petro-pedagogy: Fossil fuel interests and the obstruction of climate justice in public education. Environmental Education Research, 26(4), 457–473) ‘petro-pedagogy’, the study employs critical multimodal discourse analysis to show…
Time in music
This chapter begins by discussing how music is integrated in social life, and how this is, today, facilitated by music technologies such as Spotify. It then introduces a number of key musical features that can be analysed without a need for specialist musical knowledge: the difference between measured and unmeasured (‘eternal’) time, metronomic and non-metronomic timing, mono-rhythmic and polyrhythmic timing, and linearity and cyclicity in music.…
Time in film
This chapter discusses the relation between filmic time and the changes in the timing of social life that came about at the time film language was developed as a result of technological innovations, new ways of understanding time (including relativity theory), and new ways of regulating time (including the introduction of time zones in 1884). Key themes include people’s increasing awareness of the difference between ‘objective’ clock time and the…
Rhythm
This chapter establishes rhythm as fundamental to the timing of everyday social interactions and of multimodal texts and performances. It shows how rhythmic structuring is grounded in the rhythms of the heartbeat and of breathing; how, in everyday interactions, the rhythms of participants become synchronized to each other (‘rhythmic entrainment’); and how this principle can be applied to the relation between the rhythms of the different modes of …
Notes on multimodal analysis
This brief chapter argues for an approach to the social semiotic analysis of multimodal texts and performances that is grounded in ethnography and in relevant insights from social theory and anthropology. With respect to analysing time-based texts and performances, it argues for an embodied form of analysis and discusses the risks of approaches which, for purposes of analysis, transform data in ways that are too far removed from the form in which…
Time and society
This chapter argues that the temporal structuring of multimodal texts and performances reflects the temporal organization of social life. Inspired by the work of Norbert Elias, it introduces and exemplifies three kinds of social timing – synchronizing social activities with naturally occurring events (natural synchronization), synchronizing social activities with the timing of other social activities (social synchronization), and synchronizing so…
Visualizing time
Historically, time visuals began as chronologies of large-scale historical events. From the late 18th century, timelines began to be used in a variety of other fields, including commerce and finance, developing into the modern time-based chart, drawn to scale, with a horizontal, dynamic layout, and able to represent a variety of time scales. More recently, time began to be represented in the form of ‘chronographs’, series of static images represe…
Time in language
This chapter explores how time and timing are expressed in language, and how different economic and cultural conditions give rise to different linguistic resources for doing so. The tense systems of the languages of traditional agricultural societies, for instance, are based on a cyclical conception of time and a distinction between the recent past, based on daily routines and seasonal cycles, and the distant past of mythological origins. The ten…
Multimodality and Time: A Social Semiotic Approach
This ground-breaking book brings together the work of leading theorist, Theo van Leeuwen, on time-based multimodal forms of communication including speech, music, and film. With chapters on the fundamental meaning-making role of rhythm, time in music, time in film, the representation of time and timing in language, and the visualization of time, this book offers a comprehensive approach to the subject that supplements the author’s earlier work on…
The fragmentation and plasticity of space in film
This paper explores the plasticity of represented space in film by focusing on how space in film can be constructed out of fragments. Motivated by previous research suggesting that the fragmentation of space in film can be hidden from viewers, we propose a framework for analysing core features of space construction in terms of three main dimensions: 1. Explicitness, or whether a space is shown visually and explicit, or only implied through sound;…
Gunther Kress - Explorer of the Semiotic Landscape
Pandemic playthings: A multimodal perspective on toys and toy play in the time of Covid-19
This article considers ways in which toys have featured in children’s play throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Whilst often dismissed as trivial novelties, toys can be seen as a significant aspect of material culture, both reflecting and constructing ideas of childhood. A multimodal social semiotic perspective is used to examine a selection of toys produced between 2020 and 2022 that respond to the pandemic in various ways. The toys feature represe…
Determination and agency in the work of Gunther Kress
In this paper I show how Gunther Kress, throughout his work, struggled with the contradictory poles of intellectual attraction that lead many other thinkers to firmly anchor themselves to fixed positions and safeguard themselves from doubt. I will focus on two issues, the tension between social determination and individual agency, and the tension between ‘critique’ and ‘design’. In his early work, Kress spoke of the individual as socially determi…
Visual design for sexual and reproductive health promotion: A global perspective
Practice and product: A social semiotic approach to visual communication in sexual and reproductive health promotion
This article investigates the use of visual communication in sexual and reproductive health information resources produced by an Australian Family Planning organization for different populations – people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds (especially recent immigrants from Syria and Afghanistan), Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and young people from both these groups. Co-authored by a semiotician and the manager …
Functionalization and informalization in the design of an online fashion shop
This paper presents a multimodal analysis of the design of an online fashion shop. Departing from systemic-functional genre theory, it analyses the functionality of the site, bringing out how it designs what sellers do to and for consumers and what the site does and does not enable consumers to do. Drawing on Joos’ analysis of (in)formality in language and Hall’s proxemics, the paper then analyses how the site conceals the power of its functional…
Michel Pastoureau and the history of visual communication
Despite early and ongoing calls for a systematic engagement with history, social semiotics has largely emphasized research on the synchronic rather than diachronic dimensions of meaning-making. And while the ‘instability’ of semiotic practices (see Kress’s Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication, 2010) and the importance of semiotic change (see Van Leeuwen’s Introducing Social Semiotics, 2005) have become key theme…
Multimodalidade e identidade: Entrevista com Theo van Leeuwen
Nesta entrevista, tendo o mais recente trabalho de Theo Van Leeuwen como foco (Multimodality and Identity), serão tratados aspectos essenciais para debates contemporâneos relacionados à Semiótica Social, como a contribuição da área para a educação, para a expressividade visual da escrita por meio da tipografia, para a relação entre sons e emoções e a importância da Semiótica Social para se compreender mudanças ocorridas durante a pandemia do novo…
The semiotics of movement and mobility
The paper presents a framework for the distinctive feature analysis of movement and mobility in texts, performances and semiotic artefacts, showing its applicability to the analysis of meaning-making in dance, music, animated and live action film and video, and product design. Emphasis is placed on the role of movement and mobility in identity design. Identity design is realized by the style in which movements are performed and can be analysed in…
Multimodality and Multimodal Research
Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design
This third edition of the landmark textbook Reading Images builds on its reputation as the first systematic and comprehensive account of the grammar of visual design. Drawing on an enormous range of examples from children's drawings to textbook illustrations, photo-journalism to fine art, as well as three-dimensional forms such as sculpture and toys, the authors examine the ways in which images communicate meaning. Features of this fully updated …
Gunther’s gallery
Preview this article: Gunther’s gallery, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/langct.00030.lee-1.gif
The Handbook of Visual Analysis
Introduction Content Analysis of Visual Images - Philip Bell Approaches to Analysis in Visual Anthropology - Malcolm Collier Seeing beyond Belief - Martin Lister and Liz Wells Cultural Studies as an Approach to Analyzing the Visual Semiotics and Iconography - Theo van Leeuwen A Therapeutic Perspective - Gertraud Diem-Wille The Use of Drawings in Child Psychoanalysis and Social Science Visual Meaning - Carey Jewitt and Rumiko Oyama A Social Semiot…
Multimodality and Time: A Social Semiotic Approach
This ground-breaking book brings together the work of leading theorist, Theo van Leeuwen, on time-based multimodal forms of communication including speech, music, and film. With chapters on the fundamental meaning-making role of rhythm, time in music, time in film, the representation of time and timing in language, and the visualization of time, this book offers a comprehensive approach to the subject that supplements the author’s earlier work on…
Legitimizing Immigration Control: A Discourse-Historical Analysis
Austrian immigration authorities frequently reject the family reunion applications of immigrant workers. They justify their decisions not only on legal grounds but also on the basis of their own often prejudiced judgements of the applicants' ability to `integrate' into Austrian society. A discourse-historical method is combined with systemic-functionally oriented methods of text analysis to study the official letters which notify immigrant worker…
Colour as a semiotic mode: Notes for a grammar of colour
This article presents a brief review of several approaches of ‘grammar’, as the basis for a discussion of culturally produced regularities in the uses of colour; that is, the possibility of extending the use of ‘grammar’ to colour as a communicational resource. Colour is discussed as a semiotic resource - a mode, which, like other modes, is multifunctional in its uses in the culturally located making of signs. The authors make some use of the Jak…
Representing Social Action
The paper presents a framework for describing the representation of social action in English discourse, attempting to relate sociologically relevant categories of action to their grammatical and rhetorical realization in discourse. Departing from Halliday's theory of transitivity, it begins by describing 15 types of action and their typical grammatical realizations. It then describes the transformations which social actions can undergo in discour…
Genre and Field in Critical Discourse Analysis: A Synopsis
This paper relates the concepts of genre and field, as developed in the context of systemic-functional linguistics, to the broader concepts of discourse and discursive practice. Generic structure is described in terms of the sequencing of speech acts, and as realizing the activity sequences which form the core of discursive practices. Field structure is reinterpreted as the recontextualization of social practice and as realizing discourses, that …
Social media as semiotic technology and social practice: The case of ResearchGate’s design and its potential to transform social practice
This article addresses the need for critical approaches to social media by bridging the focus on language and other semiotic resources that characterises discourse studies with the broader perspective on social media as social, cultural, economic and technological constructs that dominates media and cultural studies. Specifically, we propose a model for analysing how social media as semiotic technologies, that is, technologies designed to enable …
Global schemas and local discourses in Cosmopolitan
This paper investigates the representation of female identity and practice in the U.K., Dutch, German, Spanish, Greek, Finnish, Indian and Taiwanese versions of Cosmopolitan magazine. It shows how a 'problem-solution' discourse schema underlies a range of articles that do not all use a problem-solution genre. While this schema is clearly global and occurs in all the versions of the magazine, it allows for local variation in terms of the kinds of …
Typographic meaning
What is Authenticity
The critical analysis of musical discourse
This paper argues that, contrary to what many musicologists and classical musicians have maintained, music can, and should, be analysed as discourse. It then surveys a number of approaches to the critical analysis of musical discourse and applies these approaches to a range of examples, including sonatas, advertising jingles and news signature tunes
Conjunctive structure in documentary film and television
(1991). Conjunctive structure in documentary film and television. Continuum: Vol. 5, Media/Discourse, pp. 76-114
Special issue: Social media as semiotic technology
Social media technology has become ubiquitous in modern life. Take as an example, the role of social media in the mundane routine of waiting for the bus. People may take a picture of a funny bird a
Global media: Generic Homogeneity and Discursive Diversity
This paper forms part of a larger study in which we investigate the notion that the formats of global media output are increasingly homogeneous while the discursive construction of their content is
The semiotics of texture: From tactile to visual
The term ‘texture’ is often applied beyond the tactile, to describe visual and aural qualities. While tactile, visual and aural texture have been studied separately in various fields, the relationships between them remain largely unexplored. To address this gap, this article proposes parameters for describing tactile surface texture and visual texture, and compares their meaning-making potential. The authors argue that, as new technologies increa…
Multimodal dialogue on social media
This paper examines digitally mediated multimodal dialogue on social media in relation to intersections between semiotic technology and social communication. In the paper, the theoretical and methodological approach to multimodal social media dialogue explores the interdependence between the design and the use of social media, showing how social media provide pre-designed templates for exchanging of information and how users respond to these tech…
Moral evaluation in critical discourse analysis
Discourse analysis can reveal what texts leave out, and how texts transform and evaluate the social realities they represent but critical discourse analysis must also evaluate the findings of discourse analysis, and, this paper argues, this cannot be done on discourse-internal grounds alone.To develop this argument, the paper will first discuss how critical discourse analysts might establish whether misrepresentations have taken place, and then h…
Modality in the digital age
Kress and Van Leeuwen’s book Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2006[1996]) provides a robust framework for describing modality in visual texts. However, in the digital age, familiar markers of modality are being creatively reconfigured. New technological affordances, including new modes of production, multiple platforms for distribution, and increased user control of modal variables, raise questions about the role of modality in conte…
Translation, adaptation, globalization: The Vietnam News
The Vietnam News is an English language daily newspaper produced on behalf of the Vietnamese Government, as part of its market reform policies. Drawing on an analysis of 100 translations from the Vietnamese press and their rewrites by the paper's foreign sub-editors, as well as on interviews with sub-editors and journalist-translators working at the Vietnam News, the article documents the translation and adaptation decisions that constitute the p…
Music and ideology: Notes toward a sociosemiotics of mass media music
Animation and the remediation of school physics – a social semiotic approach
This paper opens by proposing a model for the holistic study of design software that emphasises user operations. It then examines the affordances of Explain Everything, a popular interactive whiteboard software, for animating concepts that play a crucial role in the Australian Year 7–10 physics curriculum. Building on earlier work on animation by Leão [(2012a). “Movement in Film Titles: An Analytical Approach.” Unpublished PhD, University of Tech…
Language style and lifestyle: The case of a global magazine
This article seeks to co-articulate a sociological and a linguistic-discourse analytical concept of style. In both fields there has been some renewed interest in the notion of lifestyle as commentators have noted that, with the decline of traditional types of social groupings such as class and age, lifestyle has become the dominant source of social identity. Both therefore centre on style as the expression of identity and values. The authors use …
Teddy Bear Stories
This paper presents a semiotic analysis of a key cultural artefact, the teddy bear. After introducing the iconography of the teddy bear, it analyses different kinds of stories to show how teddy bears are endowed with meaning in everyday life: stories from children's books, reminiscences by adults about their childhood teddy bears, and children's accounts of what they do with their teddy bears, both written for school and told 'out of school'. The…
David Byrne really does love PowerPoint”: Art as research on semiotics and semiotic technology
This article presents a reading of David Byrne's Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information, an art work created with MicroSoft's presentation software PowerPoint, as an instance of creative research on semiotics and semiotic technology. It reveals commonalities and differences between Byrne's ideas about PowerPoint and related ideas from linguistics and semiotics, and is intended as a contribution to research on PowerPoint, and on semioti…
Grammar, society, and the speech act: Renewing the connections
Rhythmic Structure of the Film Text
The sociosemiotics of easy listening music
Conjunctive structure in documentary film and television
(1991). Conjunctive structure in documentary film and television. Continuum: Vol. 5, Media/Discourse, pp. 76-114
Ways of arguing: A reply to Brück and Docker
A material girl in bluebeard's castle
Susan McClary, Feminine Endings ‐ Music, Gender and Sexuality (Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 220 pp
The revelatory interview
Genre and Field in Critical Discourse Analysis: A Synopsis
This paper relates the concepts of genre and field, as developed in the context of systemic-functional linguistics, to the broader concepts of discourse and discursive practice. Generic structure is described in terms of the sequencing of speech acts, and as realizing the activity sequences which form the core of discursive practices. Field structure is reinterpreted as the recontextualization of social practice and as realizing discourses, that …
Representing Social Action
The paper presents a framework for describing the representation of social action in English discourse, attempting to relate sociologically relevant categories of action to their grammatical and rhetorical realization in discourse. Departing from Halliday's theory of transitivity, it begins by describing 15 types of action and their typical grammatical realizations. It then describes the transformations which social actions can undergo in discour…
Grammar, society, and the speech act: Renewing the connections
Music and ideology: Notes toward a sociosemiotics of mass media music
Speech, Music, Sound
This book explores what speech, music and other sounds have in common. It gives a detailed description of the way perspective, rhythm, textual quality and other aspects of sound are used to communicate emotion and meaning. It draws on a wealth of examples from radio (disk jockey and newsreading speech, radio plays, advertising jingles, news signature tunes), film soundtracks (The Piano, The X-files, Disney animation films), music ranging from med…
Legitimizing Immigration Control: A Discourse-Historical Analysis
Austrian immigration authorities frequently reject the family reunion applications of immigrant workers. They justify their decisions not only on legal grounds but also on the basis of their own often prejudiced judgements of the applicants' ability to `integrate' into Austrian society. A discourse-historical method is combined with systemic-functionally oriented methods of text analysis to study the official letters which notify immigrant worker…
What is Authenticity
Colour as a semiotic mode: Notes for a grammar of colour
This article presents a brief review of several approaches of ‘grammar’, as the basis for a discussion of culturally produced regularities in the uses of colour; that is, the possibility of extending the use of ‘grammar’ to colour as a communicational resource. Colour is discussed as a semiotic resource - a mode, which, like other modes, is multifunctional in its uses in the culturally located making of signs. The authors make some use of the Jak…
Teddy Bear Stories
This paper presents a semiotic analysis of a key cultural artefact, the teddy bear. After introducing the iconography of the teddy bear, it analyses different kinds of stories to show how teddy bears are endowed with meaning in everyday life: stories from children's books, reminiscences by adults about their childhood teddy bears, and children's accounts of what they do with their teddy bears, both written for school and told 'out of school'. The…
Global schemas and local discourses in Cosmopolitan
This paper investigates the representation of female identity and practice in the U.K., Dutch, German, Spanish, Greek, Finnish, Indian and Taiwanese versions of Cosmopolitan magazine. It shows how a 'problem-solution' discourse schema underlies a range of articles that do not all use a problem-solution genre. While this schema is clearly global and occurs in all the versions of the magazine, it allows for local variation in terms of the kinds of …
Semiotics and Iconography
Introducing Social Semiotics: An Introductory Textbook
Introducing Social Semiotics uses a wide variety of texts including photographs, adverts, magazine pages and film stills to explain how meaning is created through complex semiotic interactions. Practical exercises and examples as wide ranging as furniture arrangements in public places and advertising jingles, provide readers with the knowledge and skills they need to be able to analyze and also produce successful multimodal texts and designs. The…
Global media: Generic Homogeneity and Discursive Diversity
This paper forms part of a larger study in which we investigate the notion that the formats of global media output are increasingly homogeneous while the discursive construction of their content is
The Handbook of Visual Analysis
Introduction Content Analysis of Visual Images - Philip Bell Approaches to Analysis in Visual Anthropology - Malcolm Collier Seeing beyond Belief - Martin Lister and Liz Wells Cultural Studies as an Approach to Analyzing the Visual Semiotics and Iconography - Theo van Leeuwen A Therapeutic Perspective - Gertraud Diem-Wille The Use of Drawings in Child Psychoanalysis and Social Science Visual Meaning - Carey Jewitt and Rumiko Oyama A Social Semiot…
Typographic meaning
Language style and lifestyle: The case of a global magazine
This article seeks to co-articulate a sociological and a linguistic-discourse analytical concept of style. In both fields there has been some renewed interest in the notion of lifestyle as commentators have noted that, with the decline of traditional types of social groupings such as class and age, lifestyle has become the dominant source of social identity. Both therefore centre on style as the expression of identity and values. The authors use …
Towards a semiotics of typography
This article outlines a social semiotic approach to analysing the ideational, interpersonal and textual meaning potentials of letter forms, drawing on Jakobson’s distinctive feature analysis and Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of experiential metaphor. Distinctive features are recognized and applied to the analysis of examples: weight, expansion, slope, curvature, connectivity, orientation and regularity.
Translation, adaptation, globalization: The Vietnam News
The Vietnam News is an English language daily newspaper produced on behalf of the Vietnamese Government, as part of its market reform policies. Drawing on an analysis of 100 translations from the Vietnamese press and their rewrites by the paper's foreign sub-editors, as well as on interviews with sub-editors and journalist-translators working at the Vietnam News, the article documents the translation and adaptation decisions that constitute the p…
Computer games as political discourse: The case of Black Hawk Down
The paper analyses how the March 1993 American intervention in Somalia is represented in the movie Black Hawk Down and the computer game of the same name. Using a discourse historical approach, the paper combines three methods: (1) analysis of the ‘special operations discourse’ that underlies both film and game, and social actor analysis of the way the parties involved in the conflict are visually and verbally represented; (2) the political histo…
Sociology (50 works) · Linguistics (46 works) · Philosophy (39 works) · Computer Science (34 works) · Art (31 works) · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies (27 works) · Psychology (26 works) · Philosophy (24 works) · Political science (24 works) · Semiotics (24 works)