How to Do Things with(out) Words: Intersections between Pragmatics and Multimodality

While traditional pragmatics has primarily focused on the verbal mode, recent scholars have found that its principles and heuristics may be successfully applied to other semiotic modes. Indeed, later developments in pragmatics, such as (im)politeness studies, a key, prolific cluster in pragmatic research over the past 30 years (Blitvich 2010; Dynel 2015; Liu, Liu, Li 2025), have produced a wealth of texts analysing (im)politeness in cinema, television and online mediated discourse, integrating multimodal texts and pragmatic analysis (see, among others Culpeper 2005; Dynel 2016, 2017; McIntyre and Bousfield 2017; Locher and Jucker 2021; Beville and Pasquali forthcoming). However, these are often dialogue- centred, featuring pragmatic analyses of the verbal mode of telecinematic discourse and the written mode of internet-mediated communication. A similar criticism may be levied at studies in audiovisual translation (AVT), which concentrate on multimodal texts as the object of pragmatic analysis rather than approaching interpersonal communication with a model of analysis that draws from both multimodality and pragmatics (notable exceptions include Mubenga 2009; Dicerto 2018). Such studies may risk not fully engaging with the interplay of multiple semiotic modes (verbal, gestural, audio, visual, spatial).