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Semantics
Semantic studies of the relationship between words and images investigate
the contribution of the pictorial and the verbal elements in the combination
of both to a complex message. Most studies of word-image relationships
have been concerned with such questions, and therefore I can restrict
myself to a typology of word-image relationships from the semantic point
of view. Five kinds of relationships between pictures and words in texts
can be distinguished: complementarity, dominance, redundancy, discrepancy
and contradiction.
Complementary
is the ideal mode of combining words and pictures. Word and image are
complementary when both are equally necessary to the understanding of
the message.
Dominance
can mean dominance of the picture, as in books on paintings, or dominance
of text, as in illustrations of a novel.
Redundancy
is the extreme counterpart of dominance. In the context of a picture,
a verbal message is redundant when it only repeats what you see anyhow.
Discrepancy
and contradiction are forms of mistaken or poetically deviant word-image
combination. Word and image do not fit together. The text and the picture
are juxtaposed by editorial negligence, a mistake of the reader, who does
not see that both do not belong together, or because of a poetic device
with the aim of creating a surprising contradiction between the verbal
and the pictorial messages in order to make the reader think further about
a possible solution of this enigmatic contradiction.
Pragmatics
While
syntactic and semantic aspects of text-picture relationships have been
investigated in many studies, less attention has been given to the pragmatic
aspects of this relationship. When words are used to direct the readers'
attention to the picture, especially to certain parts of it, or when pictures
are used to direct the readers' attention to a specific verbal message,
the word-image relationship is predominantly a pragmatic one. Prototypical
of a pragmatic word-image relationship is a verbal message that says "Look
at the upper right hand corner of this picture", or a picture that draws
the readers' attention to, and arouses their interest in, an otherwise
rather dull verbal message, as in advertising. The relationship between
word and picture is in both cases an indexical one.
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