The Sliding of the Signified: Multimodal Sign Operations in a Youth-Created Experimental Digital Video

In this article, the author presents a multimodal discourse analysis of a digital video composed by five students (ages 11–12) in an urban, public-school classroom. The focal mockumentary video is distinctive in that it is difficult to interpret and has an artistic quality that turns the process of meaning-making back on itself, resisting the very idea of a single, determinable meaning. He examines this phenomenon as the sliding of the signified in the students’ video (as multimodal discourse), focusing on the ways in which the students tapped into discursive agencies that rupture meaning-making. In particular, he analyzes how visual and spoken signifiers are related or coordinated with one another across the film in the creation of multimodal discursive effects such as floating signifiers, networks of metonymic potential, and signifier condensation complexes. This study thus offers conceptualizations of multimodal discursive units that can be used to interpret and analyze the interactions of visual and spoken signifiers in films and digital videos

The Operation of Differance in a Student-Produced Digital Video: Insights into Differing and Deferring Signifier Operations and Relations in Multimodal Discourse

In this article, the author presents a multimodal discourse analysis of a student-produced video, drawing upon Jacques Derrida’s theorization of différance. He analyzes the film as a signifying chain, drawing specifically upon the differing and deferring aspects of différance in order to conceptualize the movement of signification in the video. The focus of his analysis is on how différance, as a constitutive force, splits and divides attempts to discursively construct a present through coordination of signifiers from across multiple modes. His application of différance illustrates how the present, as constructed in the focal video, is ill-defined and always blurred since presently occurring, visible, and audible signifiers in the video do not signify in and of themselves, but rather refer to past signifiers and anticipate future signifiers for their constitution as they engage the dynamic and complex operations of différance. This analysis adds to approaches to multimodal discourse analysis of student-produced videos by accounting for the interaction of visual, actional, bodily, and spoken signifiers, as well as the pedagogical implications for understanding how discursive agencies act upon student video-composers

Children\u27s Sign-making and Construction of Signifying Chains in Relation to Texts: Book Interactions as Discursive Processes

The children\u27s book interaction processes as discourse were constituted by chains of signifiers. The signifying charge was transferred from one focal signifier to the next along the signifying chain according to sign operations and arrangements that framed the process of signification. The groups of signifiers that circulated as part of the book interaction events entered into relations with one another as part of a closed system of differences, which also produced excesses that escaped the sign-making process

Uses of Multimodal Statements on the Playground: A Foucaultian Approach to Multimodal Discourse Analysis

In this study, I draw upon the concept of a statement (l’énoncé), Foucault’s fundamental discursive unit, as developed in The Archaeology of Knowledge, extending and applying the concept to a group of children’s multimodal discourse operations on the playground, and thereby developing the concept of a multimodal statement. I do this by focusing on Foucault’s semiotic grounding of the statement, which he describes as being constituted by a group of signs. My analytical approach involved developing a form of multimodal transcription that enabled the isolation of individual multimodal statements within a focal discursive event. In later stages of analysis, I identified the signifiers (from across multiple modes) that comprised the students’ multimodal statements, and found that these multimodal statements were discursive practices that created a network of nodal point signifiers drawn from multiple modes. Through these multimodal discourse processes, the students created subjective positions as part of a local discursive formation, which I refer to as a multimodal discursive microformation: a social semiotic web of subjectification that the children produced