Towards a discourse-semantic approach to visual narrative analysis
The case of the BBC news story of Islamic State (IS)
Amir H.Y. Salama | Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University | Kafr El-Sheikh University
The present study propounds a novel discourse-semantic approach that problematizes the social semiotic analysis of
visual narrative in two respects: (i) the lack of a model that can explain the plurifunctional structure of visual acts of
communication in general and (ii) the failure to provide the deep structure underlying the characters and/or objects in visual
narrative in particular. Redressing these two shortcomings, the approach is methodologically geared towards analysing the visual
narrative grammar that encodes the 2017 BBC image-enabled news story of Islamic State (IS). The proposed approach rests on two
theoretical models: (i) Roman Jakobson’s (1960) communication model of language
functions; (ii) Algirdas Julien Greimas’s (1966, 1987) structural-semantic model of actant grammar. The study has reached two major findings. First, theoretically, the
visual narrative analysis of images demands the presence of both (1) a theory that can adequately explain the plurifunctional
structure associated with the semiotic complexity of visual communication and (2) a structural-semantic model that reveals the
deep structure of the actants that enable the dramatis personae to relate to the events featuring in the
mono-/multimodal discourse of narrative. Second, on a practical level of the BBC’s visual storyline, IS has been represented
within three actant-based enunciation-spectacles: (a) victimhood with Subject versus Object, (b) beneficiariness with Sender
versus Receiver, and (c) villainy (self-presented and other-presented) with Opponent/Victim versus Helper.
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