Abstract:
Multimodal semiotic construction, a prominent area of academic research, has undergone continuous development in both theoretical understanding and practical applications. However, there is a notable gap in our understanding of multimodal affordance transformation and its hierarchical aspects, which necessitates further exploration. This study, taking a contextual shift perspective and using the Olympic emblem symbol corpus as a foundation, investigates the levels and functions of multimodal affordance meaning transformation, focusing on genre elements, layout, and symbol selection. The research findings suggest that, under the context transfer (1) transformations in genre elements, layout, and semiotic choices display consistent patterns; (2) the use of multimodal affordance meaning transformation across different time periods is interconnected, and the symbolic features accumulated in the context are migrated to the new emblem, with semiotic hallmarks and optimal choices made through dimensional shifts, impacting knowledge shaping, role definition, and coherence; (3) intensifying of the degree of multimodal symbol meaning transformation, diminishing of the transparency of contextual shifts, and increasing of the abstraction level of affordance transformation, indicate that affordance meaning transformation is not just a contextualization process for transferring symbol resources but also a mechanism for symbol meaning innovation. Additionally, this study introduces a framework for understanding affordance transformation in social practices, providing valuable insights for analyzing the phenomena resulting from affordance transformation.