'Poof! a'm heppily saving the Lord...': multimodality and evaluative discourses in male toilet graffiti at the University of the Western Cape

摘要

This paper explores the use of punctuation, capitalisation, linguistic forms andimages in the construction of evaluative discourses in male toilet graffiti at theUniversity of the Western Cape. Of particular interest is how male students usethese devises in the discursive construction of the appraisal resource of Attitude,Graduation and Evaluation. Using over 150 tokens of graffiti, the paper uses a multimodalapproach employing notions of resemiotisation and remediation to showhow taboo language, font size, images and sketches are repurposed to aid the evaluationof the 'self' and the 'other' in toilet graffiti. The paper shows that through utilisingmultimodal texts, graffiti writers are able to reformulate and situate novelmeanings in contexts; and in terms of appraisal, the verbal and non-verbal semioticmaterial are strategically combined to engender novel evaluations.