Chinese and Japanese Characters from the Perspective of Multimodal Studies

This article aims to demonstrate that a character can generate at least three different modalities simultaneously – visual, audial and vestibular — and influence a recipient in a deeper and more powerful way (than a sign from a phonetic alphabet). To show this, we chose modern Chinese and Japanese characters as live signs, and analyzed them functioning in texts with obvious utilitarian purposes – in advertisements. The main problem we were interested in during conducting this research was the “information capacity” of a character. We find out that any character exists in three dimensions simultaneously and generates three modalities at the same time. Its correspondence with morphemes opens two channels for encoding information – first of all, it brings a space for audial modality through the acoustic form of a syllable, and then it opens a space for visual modality through the graphical form of a character. The latter form implies a space for vestibular modality, because as a “figure,” any character occupies its “ground” (a particular square area), which becomes a source of a sense of stability and symmetry, enriching linguistic messages with non-verbal information. Keywords: advertisement, character, information, mode, multimodality