A multimodal analysis of public and private spaces in downtown Mossoró/Brazil

Abstract

With the emergence of new media communication mediums, after the explosion of new technologies, the downtown area of big and small cities alike is marked by many distinct and multimodal textual apparatus. In this article, we investigate how the construction of meaning occurs in a geosemiotic landscape in downtown Mossoró/Brazil, through the following research-question: how do subjects, in public and private spaces in downtown Mossoró/Brazil, produce multimodal texts? Therefore, the main objective is to analyze urban spaces, public and private in the aforementioned city, in the light of Grammar of Visual Design (GVD), developed by the scholars Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006). Specific objectives are: a) select public and private spaces through the use of Google Maps; b) classify and describe multimodal texts found in the researched spaces; and, c) analyze imagetic elements using the GVD representational, interactive, and compositional Metafunctions.. This qualitative research shows how text is related to public and private spaces as well as the reader/observer, allowing the social members of the community to understand the intentions behind the text, the reason why they are shown in a given space and not another.