The Concept of Verbal-visual Quotation Marks and their Classifications

Abstract

This article aims to present the concept of verbal-visual quotation marks and their classifications. Once the phenomenon is taken in its verbal-visual dimension, it must be understood as an opacifying meta-utterative unfolding (in an analogy to autonymic modalizations in the verbal dimension), resulting from certain relations between verbal and visual elements that constitute the same utterance. The three classifications of the phenomenon are: verbal-visual quotation marks with a direct relationship between verbal and visual elements; verbal-visual quotation marks that opacify verbal elements on the visual plane, and verbal-visual quotation marks with opacifying verbal-visual allegory. This paper aims to contribute to the field of language studies by providing it with the concept of verbal-visual quotation marks and its classifications, and to offer a new theoretical-methodological instrument to research that focuses on the verbal-visual dimension of utterances and their ways of producing meaning effects.