Some reflections on the iconicity of digital texts

► Electronic texts often combine linguistic signs, movement and manipulation gestures. ► Some movements are the signifier of an iconic sign called “temporal semiotic unit”. ► Some manipulation gestures are the signifier of “semiotic unit of manipulation”. ► The interaction of an iconic sign and a linguistic sign is an “iconic irradiation”. ► This irradiation anticipates the reader’s reactions by constituting rhetorical figures. The digital text is mainly characterized by its animation and its “manipulable” nature (that is its interactivity), and it is commonplace to say that the digital text becomes an image. In this article, I demonstrate that we should take a closer look at the specificities of animated and “manipulable” texts, and consider them rather as “pluricode couplings”, which involve two different semiotic systems, a text and a icon, within the same active support of the sign. The semiotic method presented in this paper is intended to approach different kinds of couplings between text and iconic signs and to reflect on the potentially “immersive” reading practices emerging from some of these couplings.