Materialising semiotic repertoires: challenges in the interactional analysis of multilingual communication

ABSTRACT

This article takes the inquiry into semiotic repertoires beyond their classifications and inventories to analyse their interactions with each other and the way they gain indexicality in situated communication. As previous theorisation suggests that semiotic repertoires are deployed by agentive individuals, this article draws from New Materialism to focus on how social agents, semiotic repertoires, and material ecologies work together in distributed practice for meaning making. Expanding sociolinguistic constructs for this purpose, the article defines the relevant units and objects of analysis, and illustrates the framing of activities in indexing the values, meanings, and relationships of semiotic repertoires. The role of these repertoires in the interaction of an international community of scientists is analysed through the research group meeting of a team of microbiologists. The article demonstrates that though the focal participant from Korea claims limited English grammatical proficiency in his personal repertoire, he draws strategically from the repertoires in the physical setting and those of his disciplinary community to communicate successfully.

KEYWORDS:

• Semiotic repertoires
• interactional sociolinguistics
• frames
• indexicality
• new materialism
• distributed practice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Other theoretical orientations such as Actor Network Theory (Latour, 2005), Deleuzian rhizomalysis (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), and postmodern human geography (Massey, 2005) also contribute to developing a radically materialist orientation to communication as an activity.

2 This research was approved by the university’s Institutional Review Board and consent was obtained from all participants. Their names are pseudonyms. Note also that traditional labels for languages, nations, and speaker identities (i.e. ‘native speaker’ etc.) are used in this article despite its critical transnational and translingual orientation. My position is that while languages and identities are not ontological, they are ideological and a social fact. I use the socially accepted labels to identify the participants.

3 In the interest of space and the focus of this paper on analysis, I keep the data representation simple. Though there is ongoing experimentation on new forms of transcription and visual representation, I adopt a simpler format in this article. See Appendix for transcription conventions.