Book review: Peter Richardson, Charles M Mueller and Stephen Pihlaja, Cognitive Linguistics and Religious Language: An Introduction

in the age of industrialisation and digitalisation. To examine identity as a discursive construe from a social semiotic perspective, the author highlights how social and cultural identities are manifested through different uses of shape, colour, texture, timbre and movement, in a given technological context. In addition, methodologically, this book is an extension of the frameworks and techniques associated with multimodal discourse analysis (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996, 2001). Going beyond the semiotic sources described in the previous visual grammar, which is framed as a multimodal design for communicating images and diagrams (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996), the author attempts to reformulate these semiotic resources as parameters, which may materially co-occur in the visual design grounded in media to make social meanings. This conceptual transition assists in conceptualising the aesthetic value or style conveyed in artefacts and visual designs better, to index a particular social identity ubiquitous in everyday communication of multimodality and media. A systemic and delicate toolkit of multimodal analysis is thus developed in the text which complements the visual grammar previously developed (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996) which ensures deeper understanding of functions and identity designed in multimodal texts. Multimodality and Identity stands out in contemporary communication studies because it is not only a significant addition to the theoretical repertoire of multimodal studies and frameworks, but also it serves to shed a light on studies of technological creativity in digitally mediated discourse. Therefore, the text is certainly of interest to scholars and students in the field of media studies, visual communication studies, discourse analysis and culture studies. Finally, the book lays a consistent foundation on which the media in contemporary culture can build to analyse the social identity cross-modally constructed and technologically afforded.