Multilingualism from Manuscript to 3d: Intersections of Modalities from Medieval to Modern Times

This collection explores the links between multimodality and multilingualism, charting the interplay between languages, channels and forms of communication in multilingual written texts from historical manuscripts through to the new media of today and the non-verbal associations they evoke.

The volume argues that features of written texts such as graphics, layout, boundary marking and typography are inseparable from verbal content. Taken together, the chapters adopt a systematic historical perspective to investigate this interplay over time and highlight the ways in which the two disciplines might further inform one another in the future as new technologies emerge. The first half of the volume considers texts where semiotic resources are the sites of modes, where multiple linguistic codes interact on the page and generate extralinguistic associations through visual features and spatial organizaisation. The second half of the book looks at texts where this interface occurs not in the text but rather in the cultural practices involved in social materiality and text transmission.

Enhancing our understandings of multimodal resources in both historical and contemporary communication, this book will be of interest to scholars in multimodality, multilingualism, historical communication, discourse analysis and cultural studies.

Chapters 1, 4, and 5 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. Chapters 1 & 4 have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license, with Chapter 5 being made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

Matylda Włodarczyk is University Professor in the Department of the History of English at the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. She has worked on the historical (socio-)pragmatics of specialised discourses. She has conducted, with Elżbieta Adamczyk and Joanna Kopaczyk (University of Glasgow) a project devoted to multilingualism in the medieval Greater Poland court oaths and co-authored the eROThA repository (2014–2019).

Jukka Tyrkkö is Professor of English Linguistics at Linnaeus University, Sweden. His research interests extend from the Middle Ages to the present day, focusing on a wide range of topics including corpus linguistic methodology, lexis and phraseology, the history of medical writing, multilingualism, historical lexicography, the language of politics and history of the book. He has compiled a number of historical corpora and he develops corpus linguistic software. His recent edited volumes include Historical Dictionaries in their Paratextual Context (edited with R.W. McConchie for Mouton de Gruyter, 2018) and Applications of Pattern-Driven Methods in Corpus Linguistics (edited with Joanna Kopaczyk for John Benjamins, 2018). ORCID: 0000-0001-5251-5338

Elżbieta Adamczyk is Junior Professor of English Linguistics in the Department of English and American Studies at Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Germany. Her research interests concentrate on English historical linguistics, especially historical morphology, linguistic variation, comparative Germanic linguistics, historical multilingualism and language contact in medieval Europe. She is the author of a monograph on nominal morphology of early Germanic languages (Reshaping of the Nominal Inflection in Early Northern West Germanic, John Benjamins, 2018) and a co-author of the eROThA repository.