Ulrich Schmitz

Semiotic economy, growth of mass media discourse, and change of written language through multimodal techniques.

The case of newspapers (printed and online) and web services

1 Introduction: What is at issue?

First of all, this article provides a short overview over the relationship between communication technology and language history (Section 2). Subsequently, Sections 3 to 5 draw on examples from printed and online mass media to demonstrate how technological developments lead to highly extensive and complex communication and messages. This goes beyond many of the forms produced by semiotic economy (maximal communicative efficiency) in the past – especially beyond traditional conventions of monomodal (purely written) texts, which, ...

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