Visual And Multimodal Communication

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that visual information plays an ever greater role in modern communication. Undoubtedly, language remains our species' most sophisticated channel for exchanging information, but the verbal mode is increasingly complemented, sometimes even replaced, by other modes, among which the visual mode takes pride of place. Despite the fact that conveying information visually dates back to pre-historic times, accounting for visual communication in a scholarly viable manner remains difficult. One important reason for this is that while visuals (a broad term which in this book will be used to refer to all sorts of non-verbal information in static images, including not just pictures, but also for instance lay-out features, colors, typography, and motion/emotion lines in comics) usually have a structure, they do not have a grammar and vocabulary in the sense that language has. What complicates matters is that visuals are often accompanied by written language, for instance in the form of names, labels, captions, or tag lines, and it is this combination that is by far the most frequently studied variety of multimodal discourse. Insightful and programmatic work on visual and multimodal discourse has since the 1960s been done under the banner of semiotics, many of its more recent manifestations inspired by Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)."--