ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one form of contemporary spoken and written language: news discourse, and the visual representations that contribute to verbal form of communication. It discusses their functions in news contexts and how they have and can be studied within the discipline of linguistics. The chapter explores disciplinary perspectives of linguistics and multimodality, and focuses on research contributions to the study of visual media. A vital aspect of the study of visuals involves their relationship with verbal and other resources on the page/screen. Similar to research investigating ideology and representation in images, research into moving images in broadcast news has demonstrated how visual texts on television news "reconstruct social reality and reproduce shared ideology and cultural values". The function of visuals in the news media has mostly been dealt with from within the journalism and media literature, in relation to their contribution to news values.
