A multimodal contrastive analysis of regulations and instructions during the COVID-19 lockdown in the context of the Island of Madeira and the United Kingdom

Abstract

Abstract The paper analyses aspects of multilingual and multimodal narratives employed during the COVID-19 lockdown, attempting to identify how they were used in professional and public environments. More specifically, the paper looks at editing choices, photography, design, drawing, colour, and writing to get a better understanding of multimodal communication, semiotics, image analysis, and their correlation with the written text and the way it has been perceived and interpreted, be it in online or print-based contexts. Methodologically, this is a contrastively inspired research project, looking specifically at Portuguese-speaking contexts of the Island of Madeira and English-speaking contexts of the United Kingdom, taking into account instructions about the COVID-19 pandemic. These are mainly bilingual English–Portuguese and multilingual texts, multimodal manifestations, and communicative and semiotic effectiveness.