This research field studies how specific discourse relations in multisemiotic texts constituted by words and graphs contribute to the construction of discourse and to communication itself. Multisemiotic written texts composed of multiple semiotic systems (e.g., words, graphs, images, diagrams) of specific cross-disciplinary text genres (Parodi 2010, 2015, Parodi, Julio & Recio 2018) are being studied.

The objective is to observe the main effects of specific discourse relations (causal, contra-argumentative relations) and the statistical graph and vice versa, as well as the integrative transition effects between the verbal system and the graph systems.

These assumptions have been experimentally tested in a series of experiments carried out in Spanish, with the aim of finding correlations between determined multimodal relations and their specific cognitive processing in order to orientate the reader to the construction of coherent mental representations.

Current Researchers

• Prof. Dr. Óscar Loureda Lamas

• Dr. Inés Recio Fernández

• Cristóbal Julio, M.A.

Funded Projects

International Summer School Empirical Approaches to Discourse Studies. EmpDis 2019. Cooperation with the University of Costa Rica. Funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD, 2019).

Discourse, cognition and linguistic markers: empirical studies on word processing using the eye-tracking method. Cooperation with the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso. Funded by the Chilean funding institution CONICYT (Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica, PII 20150058; 2016-2019).

The construction of the multimodal discourse on poverty in the Colombian media. Cooperation with the National University of Colombia. Funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD, PROCOL-Programm, 2016-2017).