It is a well-known paradox of our profession that reviewing doesn’t pay (in any sense of the word) but still keeps academia going (in all senses of the expression). I have never been keen on reviewing by the dozen, however, when I do decide to review, I mostly enjoy the job.
Heike ORTNER’s book with de Gruyter on ‚Language – Motion – Instruction‘ (2023) was an especially rewarding reading experience (see my review). She writes about pilates as a popular type of sports, with instructions coming to interested sports people in different media (face-to-face, video, print). When one type of communicative action, i.e., instructing, is carried out through different media, this raises interesting questions about the use of different semiotic modes (e.g., writing, speech, image, typography, prosody, sound, gesture, locomotion, touch, gaze etc.) and their inter-linking.
Regarding the richness of multimodal phenomena to take care of, ORTNER’s account is impressive and elegant, not only in terms of systematically handling the semiotic wealth in analysis, but also in terms of impacts on the theory of multimodality. Her plea here is for a trans-media/trans-material approach to multimodality, which must necessarily cut across and go beyond disciplines, such as linguistics and multimodality research.
Prof. Dr. Hartmut Stöckl 