Multimodal repair in the semiotic landscape for social and political commentary

In spoken interactions, repair–the process by which interactants identify and resolve communication trouble–has been studied extensively. Fewer studies have explored the inherently multimodal repair process in written interactions, and almost none have examined it within the semiotic landscape, that is, on publicly visible signs. From a corpus of around 5500 images collected in Germany and Iran, we present a qualitative analysis of six selected cases to examine the functions of multimodal repair in social and political commentary. Using ethnographic linguistic landscape analysis (ELLA) and geosemiotics, the analysis focuses on images from Mannheim, Cottbus, Leipzig, Tehran, and Zanjan. Results indicate that actors in the semiotic landscape use different multimodal repair strategies for functions that go beyond identifying trouble in communication. Instead, they rely on repair strategies that are recognizable to viewers, but use these strategies to perform social and political commentary in different sociopolitical contexts. Implications of these findings for theories of multimodality are considered, especially in showing that repair is not fundamentally temporal but is shaped by the multimodal affordances (such as spatial organization) of the communicative context in which it occurs.