ABSTRACT
Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (SFL) was designed to analyse the relationships between texts and aspects of social life. The model acknowledges the functionality of language both for its communicative purpose to communicate ideas as well as its social and compositional aspects. SFL has found a broader applicability beyond linguistic systems and has become predominant in semiotics. This chapter discusses two SFL-based models that can be applied to the analysis of visual content. O’Toole’s functional framework for painting (1990) adapts Halliday’s representational, interpersonal and textual functions to relate to visual art. Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) model similarly assumes three functions, but it rather focuses on the meaning-making potential as expressed through subdivisions within functional patterns and processes. While the model establishes some more-or-less conventionalised patterns of meaning, it also, at least in theory, stresses the importance of a contextualised approach. This chapter pays extra attention to some of the challenges that the analysis of visual content poses. There is, for example, reason to doubt if the conventions of Kress and van Leeuwen or O’Toole’s visual markers would be applied similarly by different interpreters. For visual content, much more so than for linguistic systems, it is a valid question how we process images, as a whole or through their component parts.
