The Mood of Misplaced Modality

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 146):

Looking multimodally, spirit is also the realm of colour in images and sound quality in film (Painter, Martin, & Unsworth, 2013; Van Leeuwen, 1999). These resources work to tinge the scenes being presented in ways that make them eery and dark or happy and cheerful and form a crucial resource for setting the mood and ambience of a text. Exploring this takes us further than we can go in this book, but it indicates that a major area of work in terms of our understanding of tenor resources will be to flesh out how these feelings are built across modalities.

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Here, “spirit” is expanded beyond language into visual and sonic media — colour in images, sound quality in film — as if all mood phenomena across modalities could be gathered under the same interpersonal rubric. The move appears intuitive: warmth in colour, brightness in sound, or cheerfulness in tone all seem to parallel friendliness in linguistic tenor. Yet this extension rests on a categorical conflation: it treats affective ambience (a semiotic effect) as equivalent to interpersonal tenor (a contextual variable).

The problem is structural. “Spirit” is already misplaced as a system of tenor rather than semantics; the multimodal move compounds this by dissolving the stratification boundaries entirely. The authors move from contextual tenor (social relations) to semantic mood (interpersonal meaning) to perceptual colouring (semiotic effect) without distinguishing between levels of realisation. Mood in music and colour in image are not tenor resources — they are ideationally construed affective tones, realised through distinct mode-specific systems (hue, saturation, timbre, tempo). Their affective force belongs to the phenomenal domain of sensory construal, not to the interpersonal semantics of linguistic exchange.

This is the terminal stage of the “spirit” slippage: what began as interpersonal alignment in language becomes a free-floating “vibe” across all media. In collapsing the semiotic architecture into an affective continuum, the model abandons its own theoretical stratification. Meaning dissolves into mood, context into feeling, tenor into tone.