ABSTRACT
Visual analysis has traditionally focused on the denotative and connotative, or symbolic, meanings of depicted people, places and things, and treated composition mainly in formal terms. This book treats visual composition as a ‘grammar’ which allows depicted people, places and things to be combined into meaningful wholes. Drawing on the insights of critical discourse analysis, the book shows how images and other visuals, such as diagrams and the layout of magazine pages and interfaces, have their own distinct potentials for meaning-making, different from those of speech and writing.
The chapter also explains the key differences between social semiotics, the theory that underpins the book, and earlier approaches to semiotics. Social semiotics sees signs as always motivated, and it sees sign-makers and sign-interpreters as active users of semiotic resources, and meaning as intricately connected to the contexts in which signs are made and interpreted, and to the interests of the sign-makers or interpreters.
