1

The following is a preproof version of a chapter that was subsequently

published as follows:

Forceville, Charles (2022). “Visual and multimodal communication across

cultures.” In: István Kecskés (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of
Intercultural Pragmatics/CHIP (527-551). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. DOI: 10.1017/9781108884303.

If you want to quote from this chapter, you are strongly recommended to
check the published version. Please note that some of the pictures in this
version, and the accompanying descriptions, are different from those in the
published version! In the published version, moreover, all pictures are in black
and white. ChF, 29-9-‘22

“Visual and Multimodal Communication across Cultures”

Charles Forceville

1. Introduction: Preliminary Assumptions

In Planet Earth’s global village, good communication between people from different cultures 1
(or, for that matter, subcultures) becomes ever more important. Successful communication
depends on cooperation between two communicating parties: it is in their mutual interest that the
message communicated by the sender is understood by its recipient. Communication thus
crucially depends on cooperation between sender and recipient (Grice 1975; Clark 1996) – who
in spoken communication typically change roles constantly. This is the key idea underlying
relevance theory (e.g., Sperber and Wilson 1995; Wilson and Sperber 2004, 2012; Clark 2013;
see also Moeschler this volume), which I adopt as the model of communication in this Chapter.
Relevance theory (RT) assumes that other things being equal, humans are naturally inclined to
help each other, and therefore to optimize the chance that their fellow creatures understand them.

“Classic” RT focuses almost exclusively on spoken, face-to-face communication between

two individuals, but Sperber and Wilson claim that ultimately all communication is governed by

1
We can understand culture as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and
any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (Tylor 1871: 1).
 2

communicators’ attempts to be optimally relevant to each other. I completely agree with them.
To fulfill its promise to function as an inclusive theory of communication, however, RT must
also be able to accommodate communication that pertains to other semiotic resources (or:
“modes”) than only spoken language, such as visual and musical communication. I have made
proposals for adapting RT in light of this goal (Forceville 2020a). An important reason
necessitating these adaptations is the following: When communication is verbal in nature,
knowledge of the grammar and vocabulary of a language shared between the interlocutors
enormously facilitates the process of exchanging information. But much communication,
particularly mass-communication, is of a non-verbal nature, consisting for instance of pictures.
When pictures depict entities such as persons, objects, and other phenomena, these depictions
often resemble their real-life referents – and thereby function as Peircean icons. Moreover, the
spatial positions of the entities vis-à-vis each other suggest certain relationships between them.
Iconicity and suggested relationships together usually help steer the envisaged interpretation of a
visual message. This should not mislead us, however, into thinking that pictures communicate in
the same way as languages. Pictures have elements and structure – but no vocabulary and
grammar (pace Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996; see Forceville 1999 for discussion).

Does the absence of a (language-specific) vocabulary and a grammar in pictures, then,

make visual communication a perfect vehicle for communication across (sub)cultures? One
reason we have to be cautious about embracing this hopeful idea is that a picture is often
accompanied by information in one or more other modes, mainly the written-language mode
(titles, captions, headings, tag lines …). In many cases, that is, the correct interpretation of a
message that straddles more than one mode (and thus is a “multimodal” message) requires that
information in the contributing modes is combined – which in the case of verbal-visual messages
thus still requires knowledge of the language used.

Indeed, it is nowadays increasingly acknowledged that most communication draws on

more than one mode, and is thereby multimodal (e.g., Adami 2017). Multimodality has over the
past decades developed into a discipline in its own right, although it has strong roots in
semiotics. Several handbooks and text books have appeared (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996;
Sachs-Hombach 2005; Jewitt 2014; Jewitt et al. 2016; Rose 2016; Bateman et al. 2017), and
particularly the study of the visual mode in combination with written language is flourishing
 3

(e.g., Kress and Van Leeuwen 2001; Sachs-Hombach 2006; Royce and Bowcher 2007; Bateman
2008, 2014, 2016; Elleström 2010; Kress 2010; Sachs-Hombach and Totzke 2011; Gibbons
2012; Machin 2014; Moya Guijarro 2014; Archer and Breuer 2015; Pauwels 2015; Klug and
Stöckl 2016; Tseronis and Forceville 2017; Wildfeuer et al. 2019; Forceville 2020a; Moya
Guijarro and Ventola 2022; see also Grau and Veigl 2011; Zhang 2021; Norris this volume).
Journals such as Visual Communication, Multimodal Communication, and Multimodality and
Society provide platforms for further advancing multimodality research. Although no conclusive
definition of “mode” has hitherto been agreed upon, it is generally accepted that visuals and
written language deserve mode-status (see e.g., Bateman et al. 2020; responding to Forceville
2020b; Forceville 2021 for further discussion about “mode”).

Fortunately, most multimodality scholars also concur that the following three interrelated
affordances/competences are vital for the interpretation of a discourse or message (the two terms
will henceforth be used interchangeably). The first is sensory access to the (combination of)
mode(s) that is enabled, c.q., disenabled, by the medium (e.g., written text and/or spoken text
and/or visuals and/or sound and/or music and/or bodily behavior): for instance, deaf people
cannot hear music; Braille texts behind glass cannot be touched. The second competence is
knowledge of the conventions and codes of the medium in which a discourse occurs (printed
text? radio? television? film? opera? YouTube? Instagram? Twitter?). For instance, to
understand a newspaper article or a novel, we need to be familiar with the language’s vocabulary
and grammar; to understand the story in a comics album we need to know how to interpret
sequential images. The third competence is awareness of the genre of the discourse. Is it an
advertisement? A political cartoon? An instruction manual? A traffic sign? A tragedy? A
comedy? A rap song? Genre is the single most important pragmatic factor steering interpretation
of a message or discourse. Correct genre attribution enormously steers and constrains
interpretation.

A good understanding of medium, modes, and genre, however, does not suffice for an
audience’s interpretation of a message. A crucial factor that a proficient communicator needs to
take into account to enhance the chances that an audience will understand a message, and find it
relevant, is the “cognitive environment” (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 38) of that audience. The
cognitive environment pertains to the sum total of everything the audience knows, believes, and
 4

finds important. Informally stated, successful communication presupposes that the sender of a
message is aware of, and appeals optimally to, the target audience’s background knowledge of,
and ideas about, any persons, objects, and events or scenarios that are represented in the
discourse.

This last issue becomes particularly pertinent in the case of visual and multimodal
communication that straddles cultures, as in a situation in which a person from one culture is
faced with a discourse from another culture, or a person or institution from one culture wants to
communicate to an audience from another culture. Folklore wisdom has it that a picture tells
more than a thousand words, but while it is true that visual information from a foreign culture is
likely to be more informative than any verbal information from that same culture conveyed in an
unfamiliar language, it should not be underestimated how much knowledge is needed for
understanding pictures and other visuals. Consequently, in cross-cultural communication the risk
that the audience misconstrues or misinterprets a message is greater than in within-culture
communication.

In the latter part of this highly exploratory Chapter I will zoom in on the issue how (lack
of) pertinent background knowledge and values of audiences of mass-communicative messages
must be taken into consideration in discussions of cross-cultural communication by analyzing a
number of case studies. For practical reasons I will restrict myself to static (i.e., non-moving)
visuals and to multimodal messages consisting of visuals accompanied by short, written texts.
But before I can embark on the case studies, I will need to say a bit more about how RT
discusses meaning-making by briefly explaining the concepts of explicit, implicit, and
symptomatic meaning informally (for a more complete overview of how I use these and other
RT terms in the analysis of visual and multimodal communication, see Forceville 2020a).

2. Explicit, Implicit, and Symptomatic Meaning

Communication can range from being fully explicit to highly implicit. When it verges toward
explicitness, the message conveys “explicatures,” meaning that it is likely to be understood in the
same way by all envisaged addressees. By contrast, the more a discourse verges toward
implicitness (that is, communicates “implicatures”), the more the interpretation of the discourse
 5

requires combining text-internal information with contextually pertinent situational and/or

background knowledge, and hence the more its interpretation is likely to diverge between
different addressees. There is a continuum from strong implicatures (that is, aspects of meaning
that must be inferred in order for the message to make sense) to weak implicatures (aspects of
meaning that can but need not be inferred by the audience for the message to make sense). Much
communication combines explicit chunks of information with implicit chunks. While one might
think that ideally communication is as explicit as possible, this assumption is wrong. Although
sometimes there is a prize on maximum explicitness (e.g., when formulating laws), often full
explicitness would make communication needlessly laborious and tedious, as it would require
the formulation of all kinds of background assumptions that presumably are already shared
between communicator and addressee. Successful communication depends on the addressees’
ability to bring to bear the right kind of situational or background knowledge on the message so
as to infer the assumptions the communicator wants them to infer. There are situations in which a
communicator may have good reasons to be less than fully explicit (e.g., trying to be polite,
circumventing censorship, ensuring a joke is funny, or making a literary text attractively
polyvalent), relying on the envisaged addressee to infer what was meant.

Whereas the lack of clarity of a message may be due to the fact that it is highly implicit, it
may also be the case that an addressee derives meaning from a message or discourse that was not
intended by the communicator to be derived. The film scholar David Bordwell (1989: 9) adopts
the adjective “symptomatic” for such meaning, which is similar to Grice’s (1975) “natural
meaning.” Examples would be Freudian, or sexist, or racist interpretations of certain films whose
directors would vehemently reject such interpretations. I do not consider such symptomatic
meaning a form of communication, proposing that intentionality is crucial for something to be
called communication (Forceville 2020a: 53). That does not, of course, stop symptomatic
meaning from being highly worthy of attention, and thus relevant. Indeed, signaling and
discussing symptomatic meaning is a core pursuit in Cultural Studies approaches to reveal
ideological presuppositions silently underlying such “accidentally conveyed” meaning. Despite
(or perhaps precisely because of) a film director’s protestations, Freudian, sexist, or racist
meanings may be extremely revealing – but in my take on RT they do not count as being
communicated. That said, it is often difficult, or even impossible, to decide whether a given
element of discourse carries meanings that are (very) weakly communicated or constitute mere
 6

symptoms. If your daughter looks very pallid, you may interpret this as a signal that she is ill and
take her to the doctor. But the paleness is a symptom, not a message. It would be different if you
believe that a God angry with you has struck your daughter with illness to warn you of His
displeasure. In the latter case an agency – God – chose to communicate something to you. And
when you show your daughter’s paleness to the doctor, you present it as a meaningful signal.

Clearly, the distinction between explicatures, implicatures, and symptoms is pertinent in

cross-cultural visual and multimodal communication. For instance, the creator of an image for a
schoolbook may deliberately depict a person of color in such a manner that the depiction
conveys certain negative traits – say ugliness, stupidity, or laziness – in which case there is
ground to accuse the artist of racism, since these traits would be (weakly) implicated. But it may
also be that the artist chose this depiction inadvertently, without any malicious intent – perhaps at
a moment in time when these issues were not considered problematic by those in charge of
producing schoolbooks. Nowadays such depictions would be deemed wholly inappropriate; but
if created subconsciously they would be symptoms, not weak implicatures.

This last observation brings to the fore another point for consideration. Successful
communication does not only require that the envisaged addressees recognize people, objects,
and scenarios in a picture, but also that they understand the emotional or evaluative perspective
they are to bring to this recognition (see Yus 2011: 65). If two different groups of viewers have
different ideas about a certain person, for instance, their interpretation of a picture depicting this
person is likely to be correspondingly different.

In Paragraph 3 I will discuss some cases, concentrating on how differential cultural

background knowledge, beliefs, and values are likely to influence (mis)interpretation of visuals.
The issue is thus how what people “see” in the visuals feeds into their interpretation. It is
essential to bear in mind that in reality the visuals discussed are almost always presented in a
specific context (say, as an advertisement in a specific magazine, a political cartoon in a specific
newspaper, alongside a specific road, in a train, etc.) that here is necessarily absent. But their
original context of use by and large self-selects these messages’ envisaged audience. If this
context cannot be deduced, I will propose the (kind of) context in which they presumably
appeared.
 7

3. Case Studies

This Paragraph examines examples of pictures in which the presupposed background knowledge
has a markedly (sub)cultural dimension. The claim is that people lacking the pertinent
background knowledge may not (easily) recognize them, be puzzled by them, misinterpret them,
or object to them.

3.1 Pictograms and Pictorial Runes

Pictograms are examples of coded visuals in public space that are meant to provide non-
ambiguous information to their envisaged audiences. Examples are signs indicating the locations
of exits, toilets, and stairs. To successfully interpret them, their audience needs to be in
possession of the appropriate code. Even though their visual appearance may give some clue as
to what is represented, and why, this is not enough. Since Covid-19 made itself felt worldwide,
many people across the globe are likely to recognize Figure1a (varieties of which are likely to be
encountered in public buildings, shops, and public transport) as informing the viewer that
wearing mouth masks is mandatory. But before 2020 probably many people would have been
mystified by Figure 1a – although fewer, for instance, in China, where mouth masks had long
been common. That is, many people would have no representation of a “mouth mask” stored in
their cognitive environment that would enable them to recognize this combination of lines and a
dot as a face with a mouth mask.

Figure 1a. Figure 1b. “Wild Figure 1c. Anger Figure 1d. “Counter
Mandatory Atlantic Way” runes in manga dining” pictogram in
mouth mask (Ireland). panel. Michelin Guide.
(The
Netherlands).
 8

Figure 1b is a pictogram signaling the “Wild Atlantic Way” in Ireland, claimed to be the longest
defined coastal touring route in the world. Again, one would need to have learned this coded
pictogram to understand its meaning. Presumably Irish viewers would be familiar with the
pictogram, as would tourists intending to travel the route. Indeed, the latter are undoubtedly the
envisaged audience of this pictogram. It is to be noted that viewers who do not recognize the
pictogram itself, but who are familiar with the convention that brown traffic signs point to
touristic sites (that is: who recognize this subgenre of the traffic sign) will already have some
idea of what is meant by the sign (namely: that it signals some sort of tourist attraction) even if
they had not previously encountered it.

Pictorial runes (also known by other labels) are flourishes of various kinds in the
immediate vicinity of comics’ characters and objects that (help) signal motion, emotion, or
attention (Forceville 2005; see also Forceville et al. 2014). Shinohara and Matsunaka (2009)
discuss a rune that typically occurs in manga. Figure 1c depicts this rune, in two varieties. It is a
stylized depiction of a “popped-up” vein; but one has to learn that it signals “anger.” It is thus,
again, a coded sign – very much like a word. The fact that this coded sign originates in manga,
does not, of course, prevent it from being imported into Western comics, just as Japanese words
like “haiku,” “karaoke,” and “karoshi” have gained currency outside their original culture.

The Michelin Guide has in the course of its existence developed a series of pictograms
that, thanks to their coded nature, help create meaning transparently and efficiently. In recent
years it has also adopted some culture-specific pictograms: the one in Figure 1d, depicting a
counter with, presumably, a stylized cook and three customers sitting at the counter, surely must
be learned. That said, the fact that it will be encountered in a Michelin Guide helps steer its
meaning toward having something to do with hotels and restaurants, while Asians may be so
familiar with the counter-dining scenario that they recognize this pictogram as a (stylized)
Peircean icon.

Figures 1a, 1c, and 1d exemplify monomodality, as the information in it is exclusively

conveyed in the visual mode. Figure 1b is multimodal, since it combines visual and written
information (“N”). Even picture-less written texts arguably have visual dimensions, if only via
the way different units (words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters) are perceptually separated from
each other. A visual aspect of language that users of Microsoft Word have become more familiar
 9

with is type fonts. These, too, can carry (sub)cultural connotations. Since WWII, for instance,
“gothic” typeface (Figure 2a) has become associated with Nazi Germany. David Cookle’s
“fusion” typeface presents the Roman alphabet letters in a style simulating Chinese characters
(Figure 2b). Figure 2c presents Roman letters in an Indian-font style. Goscinny and Uderzo play
with type fonts in one of the first panels of the Asterix album The Roman Agent (1972), in which
a guide at the “Circus Maximus” provides his explanations in different languages whose nature is
suggested by their type font (Forceville 2013: 262). All these cases, to be sure, exemplify
iconicity: the type fonts resemble gothic, Chinese, Indian, and other type fonts. In a similar vein,
comics albums often represent onomatopoeia visually, whose choice of font can trigger the
evocation of culture-specific connotations (see Van Leeuwen 2005; Stöckl 2005, 2014; Nørgaard
2009).

Figure 2a. “Gothic” Figure 2b. “Fusion” Figure 2c. Roman letters in
typeface © Microsoft typeface by © David “Indian” typefont.
word. Cookle.

3.2 (Non)recognition of a Person or an Object

However, most visuals are not coded in the way discussed in 3.1. When depicted persons and
object resemble their real-life referents, and thereby constitute Peircean icons, this vastly helps
steer the interpretation of the message in which they appear. This resemblance alone, though, is
not enough. The envisaged audience must not only be familiar with the referent, and with the
genre of the message in which it appears, but also recruit the right kind of associations the
referent evokes, many of them rooted in culture. In RT terms, in order to successfully
communicate, the sender of a message must appeal to the appropriate knowledge, beliefs, and
attitudes in the cognitive environment of the envisaged audience.
 10

Consider Figure 3a. Almost everybody would recognize this iconic sign as depicting a
human being, more specifically a woman. Nonetheless, there are many ways to describe it. We
could say it depicts a black woman, a young black woman, a young black woman with dark hair,
a young black woman with dark hair and glasses, a young black woman with dark hair and
glasses wearing a striped blouse … All of these would be correct, explicit descriptions of the
photograph. None of these descriptions, however, would capture what in most contexts is likely
to characterize the element that would make the photo relevant to its envisaged audience: this is
Rosa Parks, the black woman who famously refused to sit in the back of a bus in segregated
America in 1955, and thereby became an emblem of the Black anti-racism movement. Probably,
older people are more likely to recognize Rosa Parks than younger people – but it is also likely
that, on the basis of the knowledge in their cognitive environment, Americans do better than non-
Americans, and black Americans than white Americans.

Figure 3b shows a building, behind a field of plants. But what is the tower standing next
to it? I suspect many Europeans and Asians would be unsure. By contrast, undoubtedly most
Americans would immediately recognize it as a grain silo – which would help identify the
building as a farm, and thus the plants as, probably, a crop.

Figure 3c is a photograph of a beacon in the part of the North Sea that borders the North-
Western part of the Netherlands. Such beacons, which may be fitted out with specific light
signals, help ships navigate the seas. Beacons thereby have acquired connotations such as
“safety-enhancing,” and can function in contexts triggering the JOURNEY metaphor (see e.g.,
Forceville and Jeulink 2011) – but only for those who recognize the beacon for what it is, and
have pertinent background knowledge in their cognitive environment.

At face value, Figure 3d is a bowl with sprouted wheat with a festive bow knot around it.
Most Iranian viewers would see something more specific, namely “sabze,” one of the seven
symbolic items starting with the letter “S” that is put on the “Haft-sin” table during “Nowruz,”
Persian New Year. Sabze is the symbol of rebirth and growth and is traditionally put into water
on the 13th (and last) day of the Persian New Year holiday.
 11

Figure 3a. Figure 3b. Grain Figure 3c. Beacon Figure 3d. A bowl with
Rosa Parks, silo. Photographer: in Waddenzee. “sabze.”
photographer Rachel Nickerson. Photographer:
unknown. Weefemwe, 28-10-
10.

3.3 Situations and Scenarios

Whereas we may come across pictograms and depictions of objects and people in isolation,
usually visuals appear as part of a specific situation or scenario (see Scollon and Wong Scollon
2003; Musolff 2016), and it is within this context that they are meaningful. As discussed, the
emotions or values associated with these scenarios often form an important part of the overall
message, and thus a competent and bona fide communicator must take into account the
knowledge and sensibilities of the message’s envisaged audience. Let us consider four scenarios
in which the persons/objects in Figures 3a-d may function.

In Figure 4a, we once more see Rosa Parks, but here she was, as attested, photographed
as one of the speakers at a rally near the Washington Monument, Washington D.C., on June 19,
1968, held as part of the Poor People's Campaign. In this scene, that is, Parks performs the role
of official speaker at a rally where the rights of poor (black) people were emphasized. The
emotions and evaluations evoked by this photograph are bound to be different for Americans
(black and white alike) who are passionate advocates of what nowadays is called the “Black
Lives Matter” movement than for American white supremacy adherents. Indeed, these two
groups arguably “see” a different photograph.

Figure 4b is an American cartoon from the corpus analyzed in Zhang and Forceville
(2020) on the Sino-US trade conflict. The grain silo next to the farm here is metaphorized both as
a “Trump tower” (via its textual description) and a dustbin (via visual similarity). Understanding
the GRAIN SILO IS DUSTBIN metaphor requires recognition of both an American grain silo (the
 12

metaphor’s target) and a typical dustbin (the metaphor’s source). But instead of grain, the
silo/dustbin contains papers captioned “trade war farm bankruptcies.” Since this is a political
cartoon, the viewer expects it to be critical of a politician, or of a state of affairs in the world, and
thus to consider the grain-silo-turned-dustbin-due-to-Trump’s-trade-war as an undesirable, bad
situation. Even if, say, both Trump-adherents and Trump-haters interpreted the cartoon correctly,
their evaluation of it presumably differed considerably.

Figure 4c was not understood by a Chinese woman who, when asked to describe it,
responded: “It is a sailing boat, it seems to me there is much wind and storm at this moment
while the sailing boat is in water,” and thought that “the advertiser want[ed] to communicate
through this that people should dare to challenge the [sic] wild nature” (Forceville 1996: 192).
That is, she mistook the beacon for a ship (and moreover presumably did not understand the goal
of this advertisement – or of advertising in general? – namely to promote IBM). I later found that
a Canadian friend of mine, living in the prairies of Saskatchewan, was also puzzled by the object
in this billboard. Of course, neither the Chinese woman nor the Canadian friend belonged to the
envisaged audience of the billboard – prospective customers in the Netherlands, a maritime
nation whose inhabitants do not only undoubtedly recognize the object as a beacon, but also
know that a beacon’s role in navigating on tempestuous seas bestows on it dependability and
trustworthiness – qualities that here in turn are metaphorically mapped onto IBM.

Figure 4d is an Iranian advertisement for Ajilooneh, a brand selling nuts. The ad, which
was published during “Nowruz,” thus evokes positive associations for its product by depicting
the “sabze” in a walnut-bowl.

Figure 4a. Figure 4b. Cartoon Figure 4c. IBM Figure 4d.
Rosa Parks. by © Steve Sack, The billboard, The Iranian
Photo by © Minneapolis Star Netherlands, 1990s. Advertisement
Warren K. Tribune 23-10-19. Discussed in for Ajilooneh
Leffler. Forceville (1996). nuts.
 13

In Figures 4b and 4c we saw how a depicted object can be a source domain that is
metaphorically coupled with a product. Visual and multimodal metaphors are ubiquitous in
advertising (e.g., Forceville 1996; see also Bolognesi this volume), but also in political cartoons
(e.g., El Refaie 2003). In both these genres, the valuations associated with the source domains
are typically mapped onto the target. Since target domains in advertisements are typically
(metonymies of) the products promoted, the envisaged audience is expected to find positive
attributes in the source domains that can be mapped onto the target domain. In political cartoons,
by contrast, it is usually negative attributes that are to be mapped onto the target domain – a
politician, or a worrisome state of affairs in the world (e.g., Schilperoord and Maes 2009;
Forceville and Van de Laar 2019). Cultural background knowledge is essential for both
identifying entities in ads and cartoons and for recruiting their preferred associations (Forceville
2017). Abdel-Raheem (2019), for instance, discusses cartoons from the Arab world, where the
(often metaphorically conveyed) perspective on international affairs is quite different from, say,
the American perspective.

Let me end this Paragraph by considering one last example, a Dutch cartoon (Figure 5)
accompanied by information in the verbal mode. Specifically, I will examine what kind of
knowledge the envisaged audience needs to possess to be able to interpret it.

Signing their work with “RGvT,” John Reid, Bastiaan Geleinse, and Jean-Marc van Tol
have for more than twenty years made their daily Fokke & Sukke cartoons for the back page of
the Dutch NRC-Handelsblad – a newspaper whose socio-political character bears comparison
with The Guardian in the UK. True to their genre, the Fokke & Sukke cartoons typically
comment wittily and critically on some – political or nonpolitical – state of affairs in the world.
The two eponymous characters are a duck and a canary, respectively, but RGvT make Fokke and
Sukke impersonate and ventriloquize people in the real world whenever this suits their purposes.
While their basic appearance remains the same, Fokke and Sukke are thus prone to being
transformed on a daily basis.

The text at the top can be translated as “Fokke & Sukke keep it simple.” We see the
couple standing behind a lectern with two microphones, which cues the scenario of two
politicians giving a press conference. “Fokke” (left) proposes: “Borders closed for all variants!”
 14

while “Sukke” adds: “Easy: keep ‘em where they come from!” [my translation, ChF.] The
cartoon appeared just after the new “omicron variant” of the Covid-19 virus had been
discovered. One of the measures immediately taken by the Dutch authorities was to restrict air
travel to the Netherlands, specifically from South Africa, where the omicron variant supposedly
originated. So Fokke and Sukke appear to advocate closing Dutch national borders to prevent the
omicron variant from entering the Netherlands, urging it (and other imminent new variants) to
remain in their region of origin. Presumably many non-Dutch readers would understand this
much of the message if they accessed this cartoon just after the discovery of the omicron variant
alarmed the world.

But what most non-Dutch readers would presumably miss is that Fokke and Sukke in this
cartoon are made to resemble the leaders of the two most extremist right-wing political parties in
the Netherlands’ current political landscape: Thierry Baudet (“Forum voor Democratie”/FvD )
and Geert Wilders (“Partij voor de Vrijheid”/PVV). Both Baudet and Wilders have always been
strongly opposed to offering refuge to asylum-seekers fleeing toward Europe/the Netherlands.
For the target audience that recognizes the two politicians (and of course NRC-Handelsblad-
readers constitute the heart of the envisaged audience), Baudet and Wilders are understood as
making not just a topical comment about how new Covid-19 variants should be kept out of the
Netherlands, but also as surreptitiously reiterating their infamous anti-immigration mantra.

Figure 5. Fokke & Sukke cartoon by Geleinse, Reid & Van Tol, NRC Handelsblad 29-11-21.
 15

3.4 Differences in Interpreting Sequences of Images Cross-Culturally

Clearly, if an advertisement depicts a problematic situation on the left side and some sort of
solution for that situation (often associated with the product promoted) on the right side, then in a
culture in which the reading direction is from right to left the message will badly misfire. But, as
Cohn (2020) demonstrates in his discussions about reading comics, there may be more specific
cultural differences in how sequences of images are interpreted. Cohn examines how factors such
as genre, viewers’ ages, and viewers’ familiarity with the medium influence their interpretation
of comics, but also devotes one chapter to comparing “visual language” patterns in different
cultures. Considering European comics, American superhero comics, and Japanese manga as
three visual language “families,” Cohn investigates variables such as the average number of
panels per page, the primary focus of a panel (an action performed by multiple characters? a
single character? a zoom-in on a detail? non-animate entities?), and the mandatory or preferred
order of accessing panels on a page – the latter partially steered by the conventional reading
direction in a culture’s language (left-right, right-left, up-down). Based on both a literature
review and his own experimental research, Cohn concludes that “visual languages used in
comics of the world have distinct structures that differ from each other in measurable ways.
However, visual languages used in particular cultures may not be uniform, particularly given the
influence of print cultures on each other” (2020:77). By and large, despite patterned differences,
European and American comics resemble each other more than either of these resembles Asian
manga. Here, again, specific background knowledge is required to understand pictures from
another culture.

3.5 Radically Different Visual “Languages”

It is a matter for debate whether the patterns that govern the meaning of visuals and the relations
between visuals deserve the label “visual language.” Some scholars (including myself) hesitate
to do so, because the word “language” may misleadingly suggest that visuals have a vocabulary
and a grammar. In my view, some fundamental problems in Kress and Van Leeuwen’s
pioneering Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (1996) are a consequence of
overstretching the analogy between (verbal) language and visual structures (Forceville 1999).
 16

Other scholars, such as Cohn (2013, 2020; see also Engelhardt 2002), justify the use of the term
“visual language” by emphasizing what visual structures have in common with verbal languages,
de-emphasizing or ignoring what they do not. In the end, there is no quibbling about terms; what
matters is that researchers are aware both of the similarities in meaning-making between
language and visuals (and other modes, such as music) and of their differences. Irrespective of
what terminology is adopted, it can be observed that where a culture has conventions of
depiction that profoundly diverge from those of other cultures, we are made correspondingly
more aware of cultural differences involved. Here are a few examples.

Munn (2016) discusses the “sand stories” of the Australian Walbiri, where the spoken-
language mode and the gesturing mode are typically accompanied by explanatory visual
markings in the amply present sand, making these narratives truly multimodal. The graphic
elements used for the depictions are “culturally standardized,” drawing on a repertory of
configurations exhibiting “the same characteristic ‘building block’ structure: they consist of one
or more discrete, irreducible elements such as a circle, line or arc. These ‘ultimate constituents’
are combined into standardized arrangements of varying complexity that I call ‘figures’” (2016:
232). That is, the elements, of which “there are about twelve or thirteen elements regularly used”
(2016: 233), are coded, and the way in which they can be combined is rule-governed. This means
that underlying these visual stories, which develop in series of “scenes” (2016: 238), is what
could be called a “micro-language” (Forceville 2019) which, to be sure, functions in
interdependence with what is communicated in the accompanying spoken and gestural modes.
Completed scenes are erased to clear the sand “canvas” for a new scene. This aspect of the sand
medium has consequences for the affordances and constraints of such narratives. As Munn points
out, “a particular story can never be looked at as a unitary whole, and no retelling is likely to
reproduce the exact arrangements and scene cycles again” (2016: 240). One of the medium’s
constraints is that, typically, there is no record of the story.

Wilkins, partly building on Munn’s work, discusses sand drawings from another
Australian community, the Aboriginal Arrernte, in which, as with the Walbiri, sand drawings are
part of a multimodal communication system also comprising sign language and, optionally,
spoken language (2016: 254). Wilkins focuses on the depiction of space and spatial relations,
observing there are “more than one dozen general spatial properties that are key to understanding
 17

Arrernte sand drawing” (2016: 257), which favors a bird’s eye view (2016: 261) and prefers “a
geo-centred absolute frame of reference for spatial description and representation instead of a
body-centred relative frame of reference” (2016: 292). Arrernte depictions, too, thus exemplify
aspects of a micro-language. Culture-specific background knowledge, moreover, affords deriving
pertinent implicatures: “invisible and intangible entities can often be inferred from aspects of the
drawing. When a figure is drawn lying next to a tree […] it is possible to infer, from standard
desert practice, that the person was sleeping in the shade of a shady tree” (2016: 257).

Whereas the sand narratives constitute a form of contemporary (albeit from a Western
perspective unusual) multimodal communication, Hamann (2018) examines multimodality in
Maya inscriptions of the Classic Period (250-900 AD). These text-and-image glyphs were
typically made by a single maker – much like a twentieth century comics artist such as Hergé –
resulting in optimal interaction between the two modes. Interpreting them is very difficult both
because the glyphs are old and frequently incomplete and because so little is known about the
culture that produced them. Often their genre cannot be decided on, problematizing who was the
intended audience of the glyphs. The identification of persons, objects, and events, as well as
their interrelation, is not self-evident, and can only be established with a high degree of
probability on the basis of expert scholarship in Maya culture, helped by the relevance principle
that the multimodal Maya texts were “products of [a] culture with each modality contributing
towards the common communicative goal” (Hamann 2018: 143).

4. Concluding Remarks, Further Research, and Implications for

Education
In this Chapter I have claimed that cross-cultural visual and multimodal communication requires
first of all an adequate understanding of a message’s medium, modes, and genre. When the
discourse involves communication across cultures, yet other factors need to be considered for
pertinent interpretation to be accessible. Not only must communicators tap into the envisaged
audience’s encyclopedic knowledge about people, things, objects, and scenarios; they must also
be aware of the emotional, symbolical, and evaluative associations adhering to these people,
things, objects, and scenarios. When any depictions of these are in turn used to map metaphorical
meaning onto yet other people, things, objects, and scenarios (e.g., in Figures 4b and 4c; see also
 18

Guan and Forceville 2020; Kashanizadeh and Forceville 2020; Zhang and Forceville 2020), lack
of awareness or understanding of culture-specific judgments can lead to serious
misinterpretation.

Interestingly, it seems that visuals, like language, can exemplify a kind of “creolization”:
Wilkins shows how some children’s pictures reveal “a merging of Central Australian and
Western drawing traditions” (2016: 273), while Cohn finds that so-called “Original English
Language” (OEL) manga/US manga” combines structures of Japanese manga and Euro-
American comics (2020: 77-79).

An issue in visual and multimodal communication that deserves sustained attention is the
thorny one with how much certainty it can be attested whether something was or was not
intentionally communicated. According to RT, the weaker an assumption in a message is
implicated, the more the responsibility for deriving this assumption shifts from its sender to its
recipient. If/when a message was demonstrably not intended to be interpreted in a certain
manner, but nonetheless was so interpreted by certain audiences (namely when these audiences
recruit specific (sub)cultural background assumptions from their cognitive environment that the
sender did not mean them to activate), this can lead to symptomatic meaning. The distinction
between “weakly implicated” and “symptomatic” meaning – although admittedly often difficult
to make – is a theoretically important one in an era witnessing numerous heated debates about
whether a specific ideologically charged aspect of meaning was subtly or surreptitiously hinted
at, or by contrast was accidentally conveyed.

For practical reasons, in this Chapter the focus was on static visuals, sometimes
accompanied by short written text. This latter is only one subtype of multimodality. Other media,
such as film, songs, radio plays, and opera, draw on other combinations of modes for meaning-
making, and inevitably have cross-cultural dimensions, too. Members of a given culture are
likely to recognize tunes, faces, voices, sounds, and smells, and the connotations associated with
them, that are not, or not so easily, accessible to members of another culture.

The creation and interpretation processes of visuals can, and should, be routinely part of
teaching (Elkins 2003). Curricula can be adapted to train children to express themselves, and
communicate, better via visuals, as is common in Japanese culture (Meili-Dworetzki 1982).
Mavers (2014) argues that it is pedagogically very insightful to ask young children to draw, and
 19

then ask them to elucidate their drawings verbally. It is easy to bring cultural dimensions into
this in classes with pupils from diverse ethnic backgrounds (“draw your family”; “draw what you
did this weekend”; “draw what you ate last night”), thereby encouraging cross-cultural
understanding among children in a class – and indeed to promote visual literacy (cf. El Refaie
2009; Ildirar and Schwann 2011). Older children can be asked to compare visual and multimodal
metaphors used in advertisements promoting a specific product (cars, beer, perfume ….) cross-
culturally (Forceville 2017). Both in research and in teaching the study of visual and multimodal
communication can help foster cross-cultural understanding.

Acknowledgments. I would like to thank Zahra Kashanizadeh and Cun Zhang, who helped
me find suitable pictures, analyze some of these, and commented on an earlier draft of the paper.
Editorial assistant Hanh Dinh also helped with one of the pictures. My colleague Catherine Lord
advised me on some English idioms. A critical reading by an anonymous reviewer has also helped
improve the Chapter. I alone, of course, remain responsible for all its shortcomings.

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 26

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