Towards a discourse-semantic approach to visual narrative analysis
The Case of the BBC News Story of Islamic State (Is)
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21201353 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Amir H Y Salama (0000-0001-9320-558X, Kafrelsheikh University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 189-223 |
| Publication date | 2021-06-03 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Pragmatics and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1878-9714 • E-ISSN: 1878-9722 |
| Publisher | John Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL) |
| DOI | 10.1075/ps.18045.sal |
| OpenAlex | W3083232232 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 37 |
The present study propounds a novel discourse-semantic approach that problematizes the social semiotic analysis of visual narrative in two respects: (i) the lack of a model that can explain the plurifunctional structure of visual acts of communication in general and (ii) the failure to provide the deep structure underlying the characters and/or objects in visual narrative in particular. Redressing these two shortcomings, the approach is methodologically geared towards analysing the visual narrative grammar that encodes the 2017 BBC image-enabled news story of Islamic State (IS). The proposed approach rests on two theoretical models: (i) Roman Jakobson’s (1960) communication model of language functions; (ii) Algirdas Julien Greimas’s ( 1966 , 1987 ) structural-semantic model of actant grammar. The study has reached two major findings. First, theoretically, the visual narrative analysis of images demands the presence of both (1) a theory that can adequately explain the plurifunctional structure associated with the semiotic complexity of visual communication and (2) a structural-semantic model that reveals the deep structure of the actants that enable the dramatis personae to relate to the events featuring in the mono-/multimodal discourse of narrative. Second, on a practical level of the BBC’s visual storyline, IS has been represented within three actant-based enunciation-spectacles: (a) victimhood with Subject versus Object, (b) beneficiariness with Sender versus Receiver, and (c) villainy (self-presented and other-presented) with Opponent/Victim versus Helper
Communication source · Generative grammar · Grammar · Linguistics · Narrative · Narrative structure · Semiotics · Computer Science · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy · Psychology · Semiotics and Representation Studies · Visual Culture and Art Theory
Language, Context, and Text
Narrative Discourse
Narratology
Introducing Social Semiotics
Art and Visual Perception
Narrative Fiction
Semiotics
Multimodality
Reading Images
Structuralism and Semiotics
Discourse and Practice
Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities
An Introduction to Functional Grammar
Morphology of the Folktale
Text, Time and Technology in News English
Handbook of Semiotics
Technology and tradition
Doing critical discourse studies with multimodality
Intersemiotic Texture
Narrative Grammar
Turn-allocation and gaze
The Handbook of Visual Analysis
A multimodal discourse theory of visual narrative
Images in Advertising
On Key Symbols1
The Analysis of Culture Content and the Patterning of Narrative Concern in Texts1
| Highly cited | No |
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