Verbal-Visual Intertextuality: How do Multisemiotic Texts Dialogue?

Abstract

The objective of this work is to understand how multisemiotic texts interact with each other to produce meanings, observing the complex intertextual relations among genres from various artistic and/or audiovisual fields. Therefore, I initially present a brief review of the literature on intertextuality, critically discussing how leading scholars address this issue. Then I argue that it is necessary to understand intertextuality in an integral and non-discretized way through a typological continuum of relationships between verbal-visual texts. Thus, I develop a model for understanding this phenomenon by means of a graph in which two continua intertwine: the representation of intertextuality through form (Implicitness/ Explicitness) and function (Approach/ Distance of the quoted voice) assumed in communicative situations. To test the model, four music video clips of American singer Madonna were selected so we can verify how music video texts rely on other texts to build their discourses and evoked identities.