Intangible cultural heritage – a multimodal rhetorics

In the field of public communication, intangible heritage becomes a semiotic object, a “text of communication” (Dominique Maingueneau) that includes a set of communication practices that generate a specific rhetoric. The objective of our paper is to propose a framework for the interpretation of the intangible heritage discourse from the sociosemiotic perspective of its interactions with other discourses, with other actors of the public space. Intangible heritage is perceived as an emblem of cultural identity. Heritage preservation and heritage communication are the directions that influence its sociosemiotic status. We believe that the communication of intangible heritage is characterized by the allocative or the delocative modality (Patrick Charaudeau) which impose two similar discursive registers of identity and alterity, respectively. We will discuss, from the perspective of these discursive registers, the multimodal rhetoric of Ecultfood and Foodie Projects, which gather food heritage from Romania.