Between Language and Images: Introduction to the “Bildlinguistik”

Abstract

The digital dimension assumed by communication in recent years has made it possible to focus more clearly on the model of conglomerates of language and image, whose codes become complementary, producing an autonomous meaning. Internet, especially social media, in fact allow you to observe these conglomerates of language and image while speakers spontaneously create them. Focusing on the fact that the use of language can be non-declarative as well, we realise that linguistic utterances can do more than reflect a meaning, they are words designed to get things done. In the same way work conglomerates of language and image. In multimodal linguistics the meaning of a sentence seems to be given by the effect of different perceptions that are all simultaneously present in the utterance. In network communication this effect is achieved through the so-called multimodal conglomerates or aural material. With the advent of digital culture, they became the object of a specific field of study, and refer both to image science and in the German area to Bildlinguistik (which I translate here in Italian with the term iconolinguistica). Indeed patterns of “speech-acts”, “illocutive acts”, can be adapted to other codes. We can talk about Bildakte, “image acts”, Bildillokutionen, “image illocutions” and try to transfer categories of linguistics to visual-linguistic communication, in a sort of image pragmatics. It was Søren Kjørup who first tried to develop a model of “pictorial speech act” that is analogous to a speech act. After him Horst Bredekamp conceptualised pictures as more than passive object. On the other hand, we need to develop a linguistic theory and vision that takes into account this expansion of the linguistic context, which is dominated by the presence of conglomerates of language and image, whose codes become complementary, producing an autonomous meaning.