SILENZIO, IMMAGINI E PAROLE La costruzione del significato nella mutimodalità digitale

What happens when different linguistic awareness, apart from being separated from the era, from the geographical area of origin or from social differentiation, is not only pertinent to different linguistic dimensions, but also to different semiotic domains? This is what happens every time we communicate on a social network: digital interaction is, in fact, the hybrid field of communication par excellence, in which a mixture of different languages is superimposed on a mixture of different codes. It is precisely the new expressive needs and the new communicative situations that push towards linguistic innovations; it therefore seems interesting to take into account the importance assumed by the visual repertoire (and more generally multimodal) in the spontaneous use of new media and particular strategies of construction of the meaning currently in progress that cannot be separated from these "second" dimensions. This PhD-Thesis proposes a transversal path that takes into account all of the semiotic domains normally involved in digital communication, proposing the formulation of an updated model of the dynamics of linguistic hybridization of the current digital dimension, with particular reference to the Italian language. The role of digital communication in today's society has been addressed through research using different scientific perspectives: my project intends to investigate how different research areas, apparently distant from each other, can productively interact with the scientific landscape of language sciences, of image and communication. In fact, as Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen (1998, 186) write «all texts are multimodal», communication never takes place solely in a single semiotic system, but uses the combination of different codes and methods. In an essay on multimodal linguistics published in 2015, Christina Margrit Siever invites us to deal with all the potentialities inherent in the combined use of language and images without any prejudice, confirming in this way the hypothesis formulated by Hartmuth Stöckl that in the digital environment the language seems now to have acquired a new function: «Doch gilt es mit Stöckl (2004b, 2) zu bedenken, dass keineswegs klar ist, ob Bilder tatsächlich die Sprache zurückdrängen oder ob nicht eher neue, multimodale kommunikative Praktiken und somit neue Kombinationen von Sprache und Bilder entstehen, bei denen der Sprache eine andere Funktion zukommt» (Siever 2015, 15). We should be aware of these "other" functions of the language in digital use to be able to deal with all the innovations connected to it without prejudice. As Pistolesi writes (2012, 253): «In the digital age, writing is only one of the many languages that new technologies allow us to align, overlap and contaminate.» The indexical function of language has a crucial role in the use of verbal language on the Internet, which is associated with the presence of a shared archive of reference and determines a new kind of inferentiality in the receiver. Conversation through social networks, in fact, allows actions that are not necessarily present in the vis-a-vis verbal exchange, but which are instead specific to FB, Twitter, G +, Instagram, Flickr and other social networks: the sharing of various multimedia material, the option to retrieve messages related to a specific topic and the possibility to gloss it. The multimedia material thus becomes simultaneously an integral part of the communication and expressive modality, focus of the discourse and shared metaphorical language. In network communication, the meaning of a sentence seems to be given by the effect of different perceptions that are all simultaneously present in the utterance: this effect is achieved by using «conglomerates of language and image» (Schmitz 2003). We are faced with a metamorphosis of the media communication structure that overlaps written text and image. The digital dimension assumed by communication in recent years has made it possible to focus more clearly on the model of these conglomerates. Internet, especially social media, in fact, allows us to observe these conglomerates of language and image while speakers spontaneously create them; with the advent of digital culture, they have become the object of a specific field of study, and refer both to Multimodality (Adami 2017; Bateman et al. 2017; Bateman 2016; Schmitz 2016; Klug, Stöckl 2016; Adami, Kress 2014; Jewitt 2014;), Image science (Mitchell 2015), and in the German, area to Bildlinguistik (Stöckl 2016; Diekmannschenke et al. 2011), and Bildakttheorie (Schmitz 2008; Bredekamp 2010; Klemm 2011) My research focuses on the fact that the use of language can be non-declarative as well. We know that linguistic utterances can do more than reflect a meaning. As Austin stated, they are words designed to get things done: in the same way conglomerates of language and images work. Indeed, patterns of “speech-acts”, “illocutive acts”, can be adapted to other codes (Schmitz 2008; Klemm 2011). We can talk about ”image acts”, Bildakte, “image illocutions”, Bildillokutionen, and try to transfer categories of linguistics to visual-linguistic communication, in a sort of image pragmatics. It was Søren Kjørup (1978, 55-71) who first tried to develop a model of “pictorial speech act” that is analogous to a speech act. After him, Horst Bredekamp (2010, 59) conceptualized pictures as more than passive object; focusing on the Theory of Speech Acts, he managed to describe a theory of pictorial acts as something that comes from both the strength of the image itself and the interactive reaction of the one who looks, touches, listen.