Theodoor Jacob "Theo" van Leeuwen (born 1947) is a Dutch linguist and one of the main developers of the sub-field of social semiotics. He is also known for his contributions to the study of Multimodality; he wrote with Gunther Kress Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, one of the most influential books on the topic.
Career
Van Leeuwen obtained a BA in scriptwriting and direction from the Netherlands Film Academy in Amsterdam in 1972. He married an Australian and moved to Australia later in the 1970s. Van Leeuwen has also been noted as a former jazz pianist. In 1982, he finished a master's degree at Macquarie University in Sydney with a thesis on intonation. In 1992, he finished his PhD in linguistics at University of Sydney with a thesis on uniting linguistics and social theory.
Selected bibliography
- Kress, Gunther R., & van Leeuwen, Theo (1996). Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. New York: Routledge. .
- Speech, Music, Sound. (1999) London: Macmillan.
- Introducing Social Semiotics (2005) London & New York: Routledge
- Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis (2008) Oxford University Press
- The Language of Colour: An Introduction (2011) London & New York: Routledge