Chinese tourist site entry tickets: intersemiotic complementarity in an ecosocial process

This article explores how tourist site entry tickets multimodally construe a coherent message and how they are integrated into a grander ecosocial process. Primarily using Royce's intersemiotic complementarity framework we focus on the ideational meanings of an entry ticket to a famous site called the Juyong Pass along the Great Wall of China. Our analysis reveals two types of cohesion: the internal and the extended. As for internal cohesion, intersemiotic complementarity is semantically established through a series of cohesive ties between features of the verbal and the visual modes on the front and the back of the ticket. The extended cohesion is construed through an integration of the multimodal text with the material–physical and other semiotic–discursive practices of its ecosocial environment. During the analysis and discussion, reference is made to another entry ticket to the same site as well as to a database of about 300 entry tickets from tourist sites in China. This article makes an important contribution to an understanding of intersemiotic complementarity in front–back multimodal/multilingual texts and to the relation between this type of complementarity and the concept of ecosocial process.