"Semiotic and Pragmatic Dimensions in Gaza Advocacy Posters: A Multimodal Perspective"

Abstract

Posters besides its importance in societies can represent obstruction, support, thought, belief, right and so on. However, the way the posters can be interpreted can have a strong impact and imply different messages to audience of different countries. This requires a correct and an inferential work and effort to be given to different selected modes. Two posters have been selected as examples of posters to be analyzed by applying a qualitative and quantitative research method based mainly on the system of image-text relation taken from Martenic and Salway's (2005), the relevance approach to multimodality by Forceville (2020), and Wilson's (2018) distinction between internal and external relevance. An eclectic framework has been adopted from Awad (2024) to account for the multimodal perspective in the data selected. Among such posters, Palestinian and/ or Gaza posters were selected since it supports Palestinians against Israel. Therefore, these data were chosen to address several research questions such as:  In what way those semiotic signs were employed to communicate their content?  Which ostensive act can play an important role in identifying the meaning in the two multimodal posters? And which one is more salient? Are the posters designed in a well creative manner?  Our analysis identified that the combination of verbal and visual elements has a great importance in conveying the intended meaning and that colors play a fundamental role in the examined posters.