“Poof! a’m heppily saving the Lord…”: multimodality and evaluative discourses in male toilet graffiti at the University of the Western Cape

Abstract

This paper explores the use of punctuation, capitalisation, linguistic forms and images in the construction of evaluative discourses in male toilet graffiti at the University of the Western Cape. Of particular interest is how male students use these devises in the discursive construction of the appraisal resource of Attitude, Graduation and Evaluation. Using over 150 tokens of graffiti, the paper uses a multimodal approach employing notions of resemiotisation and remediation to show how taboo language, font size, images and sketches are repurposed to aid the evaluation of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ in toilet graffiti. The paper shows that through utilising multimodal texts, graffiti writers are able to reformulate and situate novel meanings in contexts; and in terms of appraisal, the verbal and non-verbal semiotic material are strategically combined to engender novel evaluations.

Keywords:

• toilet graffiti
• evaluative discourse
• appraisal
• University of the Western Cape
• multimodality

Acknowledgement

Any opinion, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and therefore the NRF does not accept any liability in regard thereto.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. http://www.grammatics.com/appraisal/AppraisalOutline/Framed/Frame.htm (accessed January 2014).

2. Chandler, D. Semiotics for Beginners. Available online: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/semiotic.html (accessed 26 January 2014).

3. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hotnot.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation.