The Multimodal Turn in Communication

From 18 to 20 March 2026, several members of the Discourse Studies research group from our department attended the international conference “Language in the Third Millennium 14” at the Jagellonian University in Kraków in Poland. The main theme of the conference, held to celebrate 30 years of the Cracow Tertium Society for the Promotion of Language Studies, was The “Multimodal Turn in Communication”, reflecting the recent shift in linguistics and discourse studies towards the exploration of the interplay between various communicative modes, particularly the verbal and the visual. The six papers of the DEAS team connected ideally to the central theme of the conference and represented well the tradition of the discourse analytical research carried out at our department over the course of the past two decades. Professor Jan Chovanec offered a sociopragmatic analysis of racist discourse in sports contexts, focusing on humorous multimodal banners taunting opponents in football stadiums and causing cross-cultural controversy. The four doctoral students delivered topics related to their postgraduate research – Sid Campé explored the issue of self-praise and impoliteness in manosphere, analysing the Reddit discussion thread r/thepassportbros from a cyberpragmatic point of view; Tereza Šplíchalová spoke about taboo in audiovisual translation, tracing how spoken profanities are multimodally calibrated by the context of the film scene and institutional constraints; Jana Hallová provided a cross-platform comparison of multimodal reactions to posts, proposing a complex framework for their classification along multiple dimensions; and Yurii Chybras addressed the issue of in-group antagonism on Twitter (X), focusing on the representation of ‘a negatively biased other’ in Irish and Ukrainian data. Finally, Erik Szabó presented findings from his MA thesis about formulaic and propositional (im)politeness in US political discourse, exemplified with a case study of the Trump-Harris presidential debate. All in all, over sixty presentations were delivered at the conference during the three days, including four plenary speeches by renowned scholars in multimodality. Selected papers from the conference will be published in the Tertium Linguistic Journal.