Abstract

The present article deals with the question of how - on the one hand - the current “multimedia revolution” changes our conceptions of text, text production and text reception, and which challenges arise from these changes for Applied Linguistics and for Communication Sciences on the other hand. The fact that in the construction of texts other codes are increasingly significant in addition to the verbal-linguistic code needs a wide and interdisciplinary perspective and the cooperation between linguistics and semiotics. From a perspective based on textual semiotics, the author intends to describe the characteristics and specifics of multimodal texts, in order to present a model for their description and characterization. The question which first arises is how the different codes which participate in the construction of the text interact, in what way they are connected and what their constitutive participation in the resulting superior meaning of the whole text is. These theoretical observations are finally illustrated by examples from print advertising, since print advertisements are understood as the epitome of multimodal super-texts, and because of the fact that the above described modifications and changes in our text world appear in a broad manner in texts of mass communication.