Relevance-Theoretic Model for the Analysis of Multimodal Communication

Abstract

The paper examines the interpretation procedure of multimodal messages from a relevance-theoretic perspective. The aim is to test the potential of the RT apparatus to various types of multimodal messages – advertisements, political posters and memes. The chosen modes of communication have the objective of providing genre diversity for the sample analysis conducted in this paper. Our analysis has the following specific goals: 1) analyzing the explicit content of the message (visual and textual, when applicable), 2) analyzing the implicit content of the message (including possible weak implicatures), 3) potential differences in interpretation that are related to cognitive environment in which they are processed and 4) how the informative and communicative intention can be achieved. The results confirm that RT is a well-grounded framework for future research regarding multimodal communication