Massimiliano Spotti

Beyond languages, beyond modalities: transforming the study of semiotic repertoires

ABSTRACT This paper presents a critical examination of key concepts in the study of (signed and spoken) language and multimodality. It shows how shifts in conceptual understandings of language use, moving from bilingualism to multilingualism and (trans)languaging, have resulted in the revitalisation of the concept of language repertoires. We discuss key assumptions and analytical developments that have shaped the sociolinguistic study of signed and spoken language multilingualism as separate from different strands of multimodality studies. In most multimodality studies, researchers focus on participants using one named spoken language within broader embodied human action. Thus while attending to multimodal communication, they do not attend to multilingual communication. In translanguaging studies the opposite has happened: scholars have attended to multilingual communication without really paying attention to multimodality and simultaneity, and hierarchies within the simultaneous combination of resources. The (socio)linguistics of sign language has paid attention to multimodality but only very recently have started to focus on multilingual contexts where multiple sign and/or multiple spoken languages are used. There is currently little transaction between these areas of research. We argue that the lens of semiotic repertoires enables synergies to be identified and provides a holistic focus on action that is both multilingual and multimodal.

Introduction: Superdiversity and sociolinguistics

Citing this paper Please note that where the full-text provided on Kings Research Portal is the Author Accepted Manuscript or Post-Print version this may differ from the final Published version. If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publishers definitive version for pagination, volume/issue, and date of publication details. And where the final published version is provided on the Research Portal, if citing you are again advised to check the publishers website for any subsequent corrections.The Internet can be seen as a major mechanism in globalisation processes and in the creation of superdiversity (Vertovec 2006, 2010). The World Wide Web opens up entirely new channels of communication, generating new linguistic and cultural forms, new ways of forming and maintaining contacts, networks and groups, and new opportunities for identity-making (e.g. Sunden 2003; Baron 2008; boyd1 2009). Technology has made it increasingly easy to transgress one’s immediate lifeworld, extend it to and beyond the screen, and engage in local as well as translocal activities through previously unavailable means. All of this cannot be ignored in explaining the world today, and discussions on superdiversity should take into account the significance of the Internet in complexifying the nature of human communication and engagement with others, of transnational movements and migration, and of social and cultural life in general. However, we should also be wary of too much optimism in this respect. The so-called ‘Internet revolution’ witnessed in the past three decades or so entices many with the promise of a superdiverse space par excellence – a space of seemingly endless possibilities for self-expression, individual life projects, and community formation. Prevailing Internet ideologies often present us with an image of an online world saturated with opportunities and aspirations where one is able to indulge in infinite creativity in imagining and constructing both self and other.

Voices in the classroom: on being caught between pupils’ inventiveness and ethnographic naivety

This study, part of a larger linguistic ethnographic enquiry carried out in two primary school classrooms in Flanders and the Netherlands, sheds light on the perils faced by the ethnographer caught between pupils’ inventiveness and his own ethnographic naivety when dealing with these pupils’ ethnolinguistic identity construction. The study first focuses on a classroom interaction set up by the teacher, who - because of the presence of the classroom ethnographer - wishes to construct one pupils identity accordingly to a presupposed yet untapped ethnolinguistic affiliation that matches the ethnographers ethnic background. Second, the study takes a reflexive peak at the ethnographers own performance and at how he stumbles into a trap set up by two multilingual pupils through emblematic language use. The article concludes by drawing a number of considerations with regard to linguistic ethnography and the interface between the ethnographer, the object of knowing and the known. It advocates for an interest in the mundane construction of sameness rather than solely on its ruptures.