COLOUR’S MEANING POSSIBILITIES IN ONLINE IMAGES: RECONTEXTUALIZATION OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE AND INTERDISCURSIVITY

Abstract

The recontextualization, as well as the conceptions of text and discursive practice developed by Fairclough in Critical Discourse Analysis, is connected to the concept of interdiscursivity. Based on this interdisciplinary approach, on the Grammar of Visual Design and on the Colour Social Semiotics, I study how a scientific paper is recontextualized in online news through the interdiscursive analysis of color’s meaning possibilities of the images in terms of visual modality. All colours are colours in colour systems which can be defined on the basis of specific uses of distinctive features. In the “colour grammar”, there are regularities that arise from the interests of producers of meaning.  And in distinctive features approach to the Semiotics of Colour, the instance of a colour is analyzed as meaning potentials. In this paper, the images from science show low modulation and abstract modality, and the images from online journalism of science popularization show high modulation and naturalistic modality in different degrees, suggesting the style of these spheres. In addition, the highly naturalistic images have the same distinctive parameters, representing a color scheme related to this modality.