Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
Department of Linguistics and Foreign Languages, Payame Noor University (PNU), Tehran, Iran
Abstract
City as Text, being a part of the more general concept of Language of City, has been repeatedly considered in urban design and architectural theory and has been cited as a basis that plays a central role in representing history, culture, and social relations, as well as in examining the communicative potential of inter-texts in urban spaces. As case studies of this concept, public squares have specifically played an important role in facilitating social interactions and promoting urban sustainability. Domestic research in this area indicates the lack of a comprehensive tool for visual analysis in cultural and semiotic studies, especially in the analysis of prominent urban landmarks representing layers of history and culture in a city. Resorting to the assumption that urban discourse is formed through a combination of elements of discursive categories, in which intertextual aspects are considered as a "combination of potentials", and based on the visual grammar of Kress and van Leeuwen - which is based on Halliday’s functional systematic linguistics and can be applied feasibly in the analysis of the multimodal- intertextual discourse of urban built environments, this study explores the interactive meaning in the multimodal-intertextual discourse of a prominent urban built environment, namely Naghsh-e Jahan Square in Isfahan, and provides evidence in favor of this hypothesis. Based on the nature of the models of Kress and van Leeuwen (2021) and Hippala (2014), the research is fundamental in orientation (type), inferential in approach, qualitative-analytical in strategy, cross-sectional in time horizon, field in data collection, and aims to describe and deeply understand the phenomenon of the city as a text, carried out to discover the role of language and visual elements in the creation, distribution and interpretation of the visual interactive meaning of this prominent urban building. Findings show that the interactive designing elements used in the new formulation of this Square have been able to have profound impacts on users’ behavior, from increasing interaction and perception to influencing their emotional and cognitive responses.
Keywords
- Social semiotics
- Visual communication
- City as Text
- Interactional meaning
- Multimodal-inter textual critical discourse analysis
- Naqsh-e Jahan Square
- Isfahan
Main Subjects
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