The presentation of Guerrilla gardening in social media – a contrastive analysis of multimodal strategies in French and German

Abstract This paper explores the multimodal communication strategies of German and French Guerrilla gardening activists on social media. Guerrilla gardening is a phenomenon that originated in New York during the 1970s and has since spread worldwide. In the interests of (re)greening the urban space, the representatives of this Guerrilla gardening movement plant vegetation in different places without official approval. In addition to this, the activists present now their actions on social media in order to increase their reach and convince other people of their cause. By using social media, activists bridge the gap between the online sphere and the physical world, leveraging new possibilities for multimodal communication. The study analyzes a corpus of 304 posts (French/German, X and Instagram). Building on the principles of multimodality theory and contrastive discourse analysis, it investigates the features of social media posts as multimodal texts, focusing on the relationships between the different semiotic codes – particularly written text and static images – in relation to their pragmatic functions. The three-level intersemiotic analysis (micro, meso, macro) reveals limited language/culture-specific multimodal preferences, with variations mainly due to platform-specific communicative styles, suggesting a trend towards globalized design principles.