A book on the essence of discourse and the frontiers of meaning
University of Barcelona Editions publishes Discurs: paraules, imatges i sons. Un assaig sobre el discurs multimodal, by Luis Payrató, which explores this phenomenon from the limits of cohesion and coherence, the game of meanings and the frontiers of ambiguity and indeterminacy. It will be presented on Tuesday 8 April at the Alibri bookshop.
University of Barcelona Editions publishes Discurs: paraules, imatges i sons. Un assaig sobre el discurs multimodal, by Luis Payrató, which explores this phenomenon from the limits of cohesion and coherence, the game of meanings and the frontiers of ambiguity and indeterminacy. It will be presented on Tuesday 8 April at the Alibri bookshop.
This volume, which straddles essay and manual, deals with discourse: a universal phenomenon, at once unique and multiple, heterogeneous and creative, which characterizes us as a species. We are Homo sapiens, loquens and also discursivus. The language ability becomes discourse, which makes us and has made us human throughout evolution. The immensity of the number and types of discourses defines our society and our culture, which cannot be understood without the synchronized interaction of words, sounds and images. The book looks at this world from different angles and studies specific cases of discourse, such as the poetic and visual, the political and what makes us people, creating identities and styles, always incorporating features of the speaker and the listener, the writer and the reader.
After a preamble that introduces the subject of the volume, Discurs: paraules, imatges i sons. Un assaig sobre el discurs multimodal is divided into seven thematic chapters: the limits of coherence, the boundaries of good discourse, the harmonies of synchronization, the relationship between words and images, discourses that perform actions, those of power and resistance, and those of identities and styles. For all these reasons, in the book’s postface, Albert Soler wonders whether, for people, there is anything meaningful beyond discourse: “How can we reach reality, understand it, if not through discourse? Discourse is our Ariadne’s thread for traversing the infinite labyrinth of reality and, at the same time, the infinitely tangled skein”.
The book will be presented on Tuesday 8 April at 7.00 pm at the Alibri bookshop in Barcelona, where the author will be accompanied by Albert Soler (University of Barcelona) and M. Teresa Cabré (Institute for Catalan Studies). This book is the latest addition to the UB Philology collection, which brings together studies on literature, language and linguistics in Catalan, Spanish and English. Some of the latest titles published are Paraules per a un poeta. Una aproximació als discursos del premi Georg Büchner, by Anna Montané Forasté, Jordi Jané-Lligé and Marisa Siguan (editors); Molts camins per caminar. Una aproximació a les literatures africanes, edited by M. Carme Junyent and Pere Comellas Casanova, and Diario de un joven lector (1938-1939), by Antonio Vilanova.
Lluís Payrató holds a PhD in Catalan Philology and is professor of Applied Catalan Linguistics and Catalan Pragmatics at the University of Barcelona. He is a member of the Philological Section of the Institute for Catalan Studies and has worked in various fields of pragmatics, discourse analysis, ethnography of communication and applied linguistics, especially on issues related to colloquial spoken language and non-verbal and multimodal communication. Among his books are La interferència lingüística (1985), Català col·loquial (1988/1996), De professió, lingüista (1997), Pragmàtica, discurs i llengua oral (2003/2010), El gest nostre de cada dia (2013), Introducción a la pragmática (2018) and, with Ignasi Clemente, Gestures we live by (2020).