Multimodality has become a central aspect for the analysis of communication and language(s). An almost fully accepted commonplace is that, while communicating, we do not only draw on language (spoken, written, or signed), but make at the same time use of gestures, body movements, typography, graphical forms, images (static, dynamic), sounds, and many other expressive forms. Moreover, communication today happens in fully mediated social environments, such as interactive online news portals and social media platforms, driven by diverse technologies and pushed to the boundaries of current materialities.  

Interestingly, however, theories and models addressing human language in particular (mainly in linguistics and communication studies) still do not thoroughly include other expressive forms, i.e. they focus on spoken or written details only for the description of communication, even though there is now considerable evidence from several disciplines that features that have been described as essentially linguistic are not limited to verbal language only. Initiatives to think of multimodality as a design feature of human language (Ozyurek 2022) and to reimagine language (Cohn & Schilperoord 2022) are relatively new and broad awareness of the need for such a crucial re-thinking especially for disciplines such as neuro- and psycholinguistic studies or computational linguistics feeding large language models is not yet there.   

As a consequence, multimodality does not seem to play a central role in study programs and curricula for linguistics at universities in the Netherlands and Europe. While communication and media studies programs regularly address learning outcomes that include other than verbal expressive forms, there are only a handful courses on multimodality itself in linguistics and language-focused programs, often dealing with specific media types (such as comics or social media for example) and not particularly discussing the intrinsic multimodal nature of language and communication. Also, only a few courses offered in LOT’s recent summer or winter schools have been dealing with the topic of multimodality more explicitly (e.g. Language and Pictorial Communication in Summer 2022, Methods in Studying Language Learning from a Multimodal Perspective in Winter 2023). 

We therefore see a particular need and attractiveness to push the field of multimodality research a bit further into the LOT community specifically and linguistics (and communication studies) in the Dutch context more generally.

In the last 20 years, multimodality research has broadened its scope to a wide range of approaches going beyond individual disciplines, not only including very media-specific discussions, but also broader concepts of language, communication and/in society. Current developments are a response to the challenges and questions dealt with in the humanities to understand language and communication complexities and to address the need for theories and methods that help describe these complexities in all its dimensions. From very different perspectives, also linguistic researchers have started questioning the boundaries of the linguistic system and exploring ‘linguistic’ descriptions of ‘non-verbal’ materials using a range of different methods and theoretical paradigms (e.g., Schlenker 2019; Abusch 2020; Patel-Grosz et al. to appear). This kind of progress in multimodality (and superlinguistics) has most recently been described no longer just as a ‘new’ research field or discipline joining the humanities, but rather as a “stage of development within a field” (Bateman 2022: 49) that every discipline is experiencing now. 

We think that it is time for the LOT community and the accompanying disciplines and programs to enter this stage as well!