Abstract

Interaction[aut]Social behaviour in both[aut]Prohibition institutional and everyday situations involves a range of resources. Apart from verbal means, social behaviourSocial behaviour is regulated through various semiotic instruments that contribute to or specify verbally expressed meanings. While there is a vast body of scholarly studies focusing on multimodality[aut]Multimodality in communication[aut]Communication, the structure of multimodal texts[aut]Multimodaltext needs refining. In this chapter, we draw upon public signs[aut]Public sign and notices to explore how different semiotic resourcesSemiotic resources, such as words, fonts, frames, colours and images cooperate to produce the pragmatic effect of prohibitionProhibition. We distinguish between the two groups of public signsPublic sign with respect to the relation they bear to institutional discourse and the semiotic resourcesSemiotic resourcesemployed: public signsPublic sign that retain the marks of official legal discourse[aut]Discourselegal and thus rely predominantly on verbal means; and naïve regulators[aut]Naïve regulators, which are deprived of legal markers and reiterate legal norms through multimodal resources[aut]Multimodalresources, offering a ready-made version of a social norm. Our findings imply that multimodal resourcesMultimodalmultimodal resources allow for a combination of legal and commonsensical meanings in everyday interactions.