The Resemiotisation of Chokri Belaid’s talk before his assassination: roles of sign-maker interest and re-reading forces

ABSTRACT

The present study explores resemiotisation in political discourse through an investigation of a video by Chokri Belaid, a Tunisian politician, lawyer and left-wing activist. Belaid, who was invited to a panel by Nessma TV in January 2012 to talk about a specific legal case, known as the “Persepolis case”, was assassinated a year later on February 6^th 2013 by religious extremists. Building on these contextual factors, the present paper highlights two levels of resemiotisation in this video. At a first level, Belaid repurposed the original legal purpose of the panel to assume several roles (politician, thinker, and lawyer) in order to infuse his ideology and political views. Second, the literal death of the author has induced several re-interpretations of this talk. The present study undertakes a multimodal analysis of the different frames and shots of this talk to argue that these two levels of resemiotisation are facilitated and highlighted by the integrated use of semiotic resources (gaze, gestures, camera movements, sound features and language) and other emergent semiotic resources exploited by secondary sign-makers for the re-interpretation of this video.

KEYWORDS:

• Resemiotisation
• multimodality
• interest of the sign maker
• re-reading
• social practice

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr. Helmi Ben Ncir for helping me with sound analysis by PRAAT software. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful feedback.

Disclosure statement

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

Declaration of interest statement

The Author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dorra Moalla

Dorra Moalla is Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of Sfax. She teaches grammar, syntax, theoretical linguistics and multimodality. She received her MA and PhD degrees from the Higher Institute of Languages of Tunis, Tunisia. Her main research areas are in visual literacy, multimodality and Functional Linguistics.