Gli effetti della simultaneità. Valori anaforici del passivo nella comunicazione politica multimodale online: un confronto fra italiano, francese, spagnolo e tedesco

The multimodal dimension, which is typical of digital communication, has brought to light a new area worth investigating in linguistics. Following the theo-retical framework of Bildlinguistik (Diekmannshenke et al. 2011), this paper deals with digital texts in terms of simultaneity, i.e. starting from the situational use that is implicit in the presence of images next to verbal messages, in an attempt to iden-tify their typical features. In fact, the use of language on the internet often involves markedgrammatical choices, produced in an incremental and collaborative way, which are then progressively ratified (Hopper, 2015). In many cases they neverthe-less seem to be unstable if separated from the iconic reference that accompanies them. The paper analyses some examples taken from online political communication in which the use of the passive occurs, focusing on some of its functions and on how they can be modified by the presence of multimediamaterials.