Evaluation of relevance in the structure of a multimodal scientific text

Abstract

This article studies semiotic resources for expressing the evaluation of relevance in the framework of research practice. The analysis is carried out using a set of German linguistic articles. The central question is the use of linguistic and visual-graphic means in the semiosis of the evaluation of relevance. The methodological basis of the analysis is set by the theoretical guidelines of interactional sociolinguistics, linguistic semiotics, social semiotics and metapragmatics which defend the basic theses about the fundamental multimodality of any text and social conditioning of textual meanings by the goals and sociocultural context of the communicative practice. The article for the first time presents and systematizes the corpus data on graphic design used in a research article; the role of the visuality in creating the evaluative meaning of relevance; three main options for coding the evaluation of relevance are identified and described: linguistic, visual-graphic and mixed. In the context of a scientific research situation, both a separate application of semiotic modes of a verbal code and their interaction in the structure of a multimodal scientific text are analyzed. In terms of integration, contrast, and double coding, the semantic relations between linguistic and visual-graphic modes are categorized, as well as the relationship of each of the modes with the basic verbal code. The presented results of the analysis contribute to the theoretical understanding of how a researcher verbalizes, and a recipient interprets the evaluation of relevance in the multimodal semiotic environment of a textual whole.