Organizing Visual Meaning: FRAMING and BALANCE in Picture-Book Images

Abstract

The social semiotic analysis of visual texts has made considerable progress in the past decade since the publication of Kress and van Leeuwen's (2006) 'Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design', which makes use of M.A.K. Halliday's (1978) theory of 'metafunctions' to identify three distinct but coexisting kinds of meanings that interplay within any text. This chapter aims to develop further the social semiotic analysis of visual images within one of these metafunctions and in relation to one particular source of data - a corpus of children's narrative picture books. ... It is proposed here that the textual, or compositional, metafunction as it applies to children's picture-book images principally involves three systems, or sets of options: those of FRAMING, BALANCE and INTERMODAL INTEGRATION, the first two of which will be described and discussed in this chapter. These systems have been inferred from an examination of a corpus of over 50 narrative picture books including many prize-winning texts. In such texts, the visual choices made are highly systematic and contribute to creating the thematic significance of the story for the young reader.