Motivated signs and multimodal analysis in Gunther Kress’s semiotics

Abstract

Abstract This article addresses the issue of motivated signs in semiotic theory and practice. It examines two influential versions of the term, Saussure’s and Kress’s, focussing on and triggered by Kress’s influence. It claims Kress’s importance lies not so much in theory as such, as in his analytic practice, multimodal analysis, as underpinned by this theory. Accordingly, it deploys a version of this practice on Kress as he is ‘doing theory’. It uses his late work Multimodality (Kress, Gunther. 2010. Multimodality. London: Bloomsbury) as the main source of examples of theory and objects of analysis, and applies a similar approach to Saussure. The outcome is a theoretically-informed corpus including many examples of motivated signs in use. From this empirical corpus the article makes some indicative generalizations about the role of these signs in semiotic practice. It shows how pervasive these signs are, and how important these are for analysis. It connects them with a crucial but under-researched aspect of all social uses of meaning, the modality meta-function (checking validity/modality of all semiotic acts), in which motivated signs play an essential role. It reveals a more complex Saussure, more complementary to Kress, and enables more powerful multimodal analyses of social meanings and functions of text and talk.