Two analysis areas shown in Fig. 2.1 are outstanding—semiotics and multimodality, and SFG, and I come to these now to illustrate how semi- otics has addressed the task of analysing written language. I will argue for an alternative to two typical approaches described below that will offer a more flexible and broader approach.
The “Text-as-Graphic” Approach
In the study of semiotics, verbal language (written and spoken) is a sign like any other, sitting alongside image, dress, gesture, music and so on as a semiotic resource for making meaning. Verbal language constitutes only a restricted part of communication. As Wilden (1987: 137) writes, “all
language is communication but very little communication is language”.
Verbal language has had more scholarly attention than any other sign type because of its ubiquity, complexity and relative interpretability (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). By interpretability, I mean that verbal language offers a more complex, wider and better agreed potential for meaning than other sign systems. Work in the area of multimodality (e.g.
Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001, 2006; Machin, 2007; Machin & Jaworski, 2006) contrasts language with other sign systems. Reviewing the case for regularities of interpretation in visual and other modes, writers have recognised that modes such as typography (van Leeuwen, 2005), colour (Gage, 1999) and still photography (Harrison, 2003) have limitations in the extent to which they can offer agreed meanings, even taking into account cultural understanding and contextual cues. Critiquing Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) project to outline a “visual grammar”, Machin (2007: 186) argues that photographs, for example, have less clear com- municative intention than language, no obvious separate components (with which to form a “grammar”), an unpredictable set of rules that may or may not be activated in each viewing, and an inability to communi- cate, say, negatives, conditionals or questions effectively. In other areas, of course, modes other than language have different and arguably richer types of meaning potential—music, for example, communicates in quite a different way from language (Monelle, 1999).
Until relatively recently there was a neglect of academic interest in semiotic modes other than writing and speech, partly because of their fluid and contested meanings, and partly because, prior to the rise in digital communication, the role of image, sound and film in everyday texts and mediums was restricted. The situation has changed consider- ably, with multimodal communication becoming the norm in educa- tion, personal communication, multi-language instructional texts and many other areas in a way it had not been previously. This has meant that research into modes other than speech and writing has been “play- ing catch-up”, which in turn has entailed that in much multimodal work based on semiotics, verbal text has been of interest primarily with respect to other elements of a text, for example its positioning, its typography and its formatting and in particular its relationship to images in terms of sense-making, an approach I call the “text-as-graphic” approach. This
approach is encapsulated in Barthes’ (1977a) discussion of the relation- ship between written text and image in multimodal representations, primarily focusing on three relationships he terms “anchorage”, “illustra- tion” and “relay”. He calls “anchorage” the relationship where the text clarifies or explains the meaning of the image, directing the reader to a particular desired reading of the image. Conversely, “illustration” is where the image “anchors” the text, directing the reader to a particu- lar desired reading of the verbal text. The third relationship of “relay” is where the text and the image carry different (although complementary) information—both text and image are important in the understanding of the ensemble. Van Leeuwen (2005) describes and develops Barthes’
taxonomy of text-image relations by analogy with two types of clause relations: elaboration and extension. He argues that Barthes’ “anchorage”
and “illustration” are types of elaboration, in that either text or image is performing a role of specification. On the other hand, “relay”, where each mode offers complementary information, is a kind of extension.
These conceptualisations do not have as their purpose the close analy- sis of written verbal text. Nevertheless, they inform much work on mul- timodal texts in which written language—for so many years the most scrutinised semiotic system—is in this view important for its shape, font, format and relationship with the image, rather than for its own patterns and content. Works on multimodal analysis (e.g. Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Machin, 2007) tend to focus on visual rather than verbal modes, and handbooks of written discourse analysis which include chapters on semiotics and multimodality (for example Cameron & Panović, 2014;
O’Halloran, 2004) pursue this focus. O’Halloran’s overview is typical.
For example, in addition to linguistic choices and their typographical instantiation on the printed page, multimodal analysis takes into account the functions and meaning of the visual images, together with the meaning arising from the integrated use of the two semiotic resources. (O’Halloran, 2004: 1)
This book, on the other hand, offers a different semiotic perspective on written language, which uses the concept of the written sign as a starting point for the explanation of a broader interpretation of meaning.
Systemic Functional Grammar
I have suggested that those studying multimodality can sometimes consider written text primarily for its graphic qualities, yet many scholars active in the field of multimodal studies would argue that when closer text analysis is required, there is a fully developed functional grammati- cal analysis framework to hand, namely the SFG proposed by Halliday (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) and developed in work by Droga and Humphrey (2003), Martin (2000), Thompson (2004) and others. The grounding principle of SFG is that all verbal communication functions simultaneously to represent the world (the representational/ideational metafunction) and to establish and maintain relationships (the interper- sonal metafunction), as well as exhibiting features which realise logical and textual relations (the textual metafunction) (Halliday & Hasan, 1985).
The principle that the properties of verbal language are primarily func- tional, rather than formal or structural, directly connects lexico-gram- mar with wider contexts, and indicates that the expression of messages varies according to both the communicative situation and the wider socio- cultural context. Halliday makes these connections explicit in par- ticular through his work on register where the significance of field (con- tent), mode (channel, medium) and tenor (interpersonal relationships) is investigated. The relationship between the text and the communicative situation is extended further to the wider socio-cultural context by writ- ers in the field of Social Semiotics (Hodge & Kress, 1988; van Leeuwen, 2005) and CDA (e.g. Fairclough, 1989), who use SFG to uncover how linguistic choices are instrumental in establishing and maintaining power relations which obtain in the wider socio-cultural context.
These principles have been applied effectively to modes other than speech and writing. Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) key work on the
“grammar” of images uses Halliday’s communicative metafunctions—
ideational, interpersonal and textual—as the basis for their analysis of the social functions of imagery. As an example, one assumption for tex- tual organisation in SFG holds that in verbal language the start of the sentence or tone unit is likely to offer “given” information, referring to what we already know, and move towards “new” information at the end.
This left-to-right organisation (in Western writing) is used to explain the
tendency of images to present “given” information to the left and “new” (or disputed, or problematic) information to the right. As another example, in the discussion of the potential meanings of colour, Kress and van Leeuwen (2002) argue that colour can have a representational function (for example, the use of colour in company logos—the green and yellow of the BP logo stands for BP in the second of the two quotations which begin this book), an interpersonal function (for example, pale green as a calming colour for hospital decor) and a textual function (for example, the colour coding of headings and sub-headings in school textbooks). In this way, SFG offers unifying frameworks for the study of verbal text and other modes.