Multimodal artefacts and the texture of viewpoint

In this introduction to the special issue on multimodal artefacts and the texture of viewpoint, we briefly survey different flavours of multimodality research in linguistics and communication studies, and situate this issue mostly in the field of study investigating discourse types involving various expressive modalities, such as sound, images and film, alongside language, though some consideration of embodied co-speech behaviour is also included. We identify our main aim as uncovering the potential of the theoretical tools of cognitive linguists, including frame metonymy, metaphorical blends, and image schemas, to explain viewpoint phenomena across a broad range of multimodal artefacts, and briefly illustrate ways in which this research programme aims to go beyond established analyses of multimodal metaphors and blends. In a final section, we discuss these central aims and questions in relation to the seven contributions which form the body of the special issue.