Aproaches to word-image relationships
The relationships between words and images have been described from many points of view. From a semiotic perspective, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic approaches may be distinguished.

Syntax
From a syntactic point of view, the combinations between words and images are described as to their relation in time or space. Temporally, the word-image syntax is either one of simultaneity or one of succession. Simultaneity of words and images predominates in the print media, when words illustrate a picture on one and the same page, but there is also simultaneity in the film, when the pictures show the actors speaking. Succession can be found in books, when the picture follows or precedes the verbal text to which it refers on a different page. It was the typical word-image relationship in the silent movies, where the words either preceded or followed the pictures to which they were related. Succession is also a typical relationship between literary texts and the visual arts. With years of distance, e.g., paintings succeed ancient works of literature, whose scenes they depict, and in the literary genre of ekphrasis, where a poem describes an earlier classical painting.
Two main types of spatial relationship between word and image are contiguity and inclusion. Verbal texts with pictorial illustrations or photos with explanatory legends are examples of the contiguity type of spatial syntax. The inclusion of words in pictures is mainly of four kinds:
(1) representation of words in pictures, as for example in a photo which includes the picture of a page of writing,
(2) pictorialization of words, where words lose their character as verbal signs and become elements of the picture,
(3) inscription, where the picture merely serves as a writing space, and
(4) indexical inscription, where the words are inscribed in the picture as indices referring to depicted objects.
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