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

Title
Organizing Visual Meaning: FRAMING and BALANCE in Picture-Book Images
Publication Date
2011
Author(s)
Painter, Clare
Martin, JR
Unsworth, Leonard
Editor
Editor(s): Shoshana Dreyfus, Maree Stenglin and Susan Hood
Type of document
Book Chapter
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
Continuum International Publishing Group
Place of publication
London, United Kingdom
Edition
1
UNE publication id
une:10084
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.
Link
Citation
Semiotic Margins: Meanings in Multimodalites, p. 125-143
ISBN
9781441173225
9781441170163
Start page
125
End page
143

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