Semiotic modes of the professional discourse of Philosophy

Abstract

Philosophy is a discipline that stands out due to its methodology and principles that worked as a basis for modern science. However, the particularities of its language have been little studied. Discourse studies have lately focused on the diverse semiotic modes that meaning on texts is built with. Professional written genres of philosophy have not been researched from this approach because, apparently, they are made up of one single semiotic mode: words. In this work, it was identified the multimodal component in 140 texts belonging to the corpus FIL-PUCV-UCSC-2018, provided by Chilean philosophers. The approaches of Kress & van Leeuwen (2001), Scollon & Scollon (2009) and Parodi (2010b) are followed. It was observed that, although the verbal mode predominates, there are other semiotic modes that perform relevant discursive functions.