EXPLORATIONS IN T H E SEMIOTICS O F T E X T : A M E T H O D FOR

T H E SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF T H E PICTURE BOOK

by

PETER TRIFONAS

B.A., University of Toronto, 1983

B . Ed., University of Toronto, 1984

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN P A R T I A L F U L F I L M E N T OF

T H E REQUIREMENTS FOR T H E D E G R E E OF

M A S T E R OF ARTS

in

T H E F A C U L T Y OF G R A D U A T E STUDIES

(Department of Language Education)

We accept this thesis as conforming

to Jfehe required standard

T H E UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH C O L U M B I A

August 1992

© Peter Trifonas, 1992

 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced
degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it
freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive
copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my
department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or
publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written
permission.

Department of LAMAJA*4T E T P L ' / A T I ' . .Y\i

The University of British Columbia
Vancouver, Canada

DE-6 (2/88)
 ii

ABSTRACT

The premise for the study is based upon the observations of Lewis (1990), Kiefer
(1988) and Landes (1987) who identify the bifurcate nature of the picture book form to be
its most unique characteristic and express the need for a structural analysis of the textual
dimensions of representative works within the genre. This study, therefore, addresses
how textual form of the picture book works, both lexically and visually, as a system of
signs and codes to create meaning.
Dependent upon two systems of signification, lexical and visual, the picture book
possesses "high semantic or semiotic capacity" (Landes, 1987, p. 30). In order to
understand how the bifurcate nature of textual form in the picture book functions to convey
meaning in the presence of a reading/viewing consciousness, the epistemological,
theoretical and methodological principles of semiotics (after Eco, 1976; 1979; Greimas,
1983; Barthes, 1964; Saint-Martin, 1987 and others) are utilized within the context of the
study to develop a method for the semiotic analysis of the picture book which is identified,
defined and applied in the study to representative works within the genre. The findings of
the study demonstrate in semiotic terms how the formal dimensions of text in the picture
book work to guide the reader/viewer through the circumstances of its lexical and visual
production, or structure, from the recognition of elements and levels below the sign (e.g.,
semes or coloremes) (Greimas, 1983; Saint-Martin, 1987) to elements and levels above the
sign (e.g., possible worlds or fabula) (Eco, 1979). Meaning-making is shown to be
dependent upon the reader/viewer's ability to actualize intensionally and extensionally
motivated responses (cognitive, affective and aesthetic) according to individualized systems

of conceptual apparati based upon real world experience(s).

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS iii
LIST OF T A B L E S viii
LIST OF FIGURES ix
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS x

CHAPTER ONE - INTRODUCTION 1

Dimensions of Text and the Picture book 1

Problem and Purpose of the Present Study 3
Summary of Purposes 4
Significance of Present Study 4
Outline of the Thesis 5

CHAPTER TWO - A N EPISTEMOLOGICAL, THEORETICAL A N D

M E T H O D O L O G I C A L F R A M E W O R K FOR SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS
OF T H E P I C T U R E BOOK 6

Overview 6
The Ontology: Prelude to the Faithless word 6
Language Sign and Meaning 7
Images and Sign: Iconicity and Language 9
Writing Reading or Reading Writing 10
Semiotics and the Autonomy of the Pictorial Text 13
A Question of Articulation 15
Structuralism, Semantics and Text: A Metholological Study 17
 iv

Discourse and Narrative 22

Isotopy 24
Function and Actantial structures 25
Summary 27

CHAPTER T H R E E - A M E T H O D FOR T H E SEMIOTIC A N A L Y S I S OF

THE PICTURE BOOK 29

Overview 29
Definitions and Features of the Semiotic Model 29
The Reader: Textual Codes and Subcodes 31
Basic Lexical Dictionary 31
Rules of Co-reference 33
Contextual and Circumstantial Selection 33
Rhetorical and Stylistic Overcoding 34
Inferences by Common Frames 34
Inferences by Intertextual Frames 35
Ideological Overcoding 35
The Reader as Viewer: Visual Codes 36
Basic Visual Dictionary 36
Rules of Visual Co-reference 36
(Visual) Contextual and Circumstantial Selections 36
Visual Stylistic Overcoding 37
Inferences by Common Visual Frames 37
Inferences by Intervisual Frames 38
Visual Ideological Overcoding 38
Actualized Content: Lexical Overcoding 38
Discoursive Structures 38
 V

(Bracketed) Extensions 39
Narrative Structures 39
Forecasts and Inferential Walks 40
Actancial Structures 40
Elementary Ideological Structures 40
Textual World Structures 41
Visual Intensions and Extensions 41
Plastic and Perceptual Variables 41
Visual Anaphoric/Deictic Extensions 42
Visual Metaphorical Structures 43
Visual Indexes 43
Visual Actantial Structures 44
Visual Ideological Structures 44
(Visual) Veridiction 45
Summary 45

C H A P T E R F O U R - T H E SEMIOTICS OF L E X I C A L T E X T 46

Overview 46
Intensional Semiotics: Discoursive Structures to Semantic Disclosures.. 46
Extensional Responses: From Paradigms to Possible Worlds 53
Cognitive and Occurential States: Doing and the Subject 57
Lexical Actants and the Modality of Discourse 60
Functions, Motives and Thematic Roles 62
Actantial Structures and the Level of Fabula 65
Archetype Genre and the Hero 67
The Semiotics of a Possible World 69
Summary 75
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C H A P T E R F I V E - T H E SEMIOTICS OF V I S U A L T E X T 76

Overview 76
The Elements of Visual Text 76
Microstructures: Plastic and Perceptual Variables 77
Plastic Variables: Color, Value, and Texture 77
The Semiotics of Color 77
Color and Human Perception 78
Properties of Color Formation: The Color Wheel 81
Color and Value 83
Intensity and Luminosity 84
Haptic Aspects of Vision: Textural Inscapes 86
Optic Aspects of Vision: Line, Shape and Form as Outscape 88
The Word as Visual Text: Typography and the Shape of Form 90
Vectoriality (Focal Points and Directional Tensions) 92
Implantation (Positioning in the Plane and Balance) 94
Visual Anaphoric/Deictic Extensions 96
Visual Metaphorical Structures: Cross-medial Agreement 100
Visual Indexes: Within and Without Culture 105
Visual Ideological Structures in Actantial Structures 109
Aspects of Visual Veridiction 112
Summary 114

C H A P T E R SIX - S U M M A R Y A N D C O N C L U S I O N S 116

Summary 116
Conclusions 118
Recommendations for Further Research 121
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NOTES 122

REFERENCES 123

A P P E N D I X A - Hjelmslev's (1943) Sign Model 128

A P P E N D I X B - Propp's (1928) Inventory of Functions 129

A P P E N D I X C - Narrative Functions in Effie 130

A P P E N D I X D - Temporal Sequence of the Narrative 131

 viii

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1. A method for the semiotic analysis of the picture book 32

 ix

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Types and levels of semantic analysis 18

Figure 2. The two levels of the theory of narrativity 19
Figure 3. The semiotic square 21
Figure 4. A "mythical" model of actantial structure 26
Figure 5. Bremond's narrative cycle 27
Figure 6. The deep level of /Effie/ 48
Figure 7. A semic conjunction and disjunction based upon spatialization. 49
Figure 8. Textual actors in a relation of disjunction 50
Figure 9. Temporalization of the possible world 51
Figure 10. The figurativiztion of actors according to the textual topic 52
Figure 11. The thematization of the actors in terms of the textual topic 53
Figure 12. Possible denotation of/line/ actualized by the reader 57
Figure 13. A representation of the levels of a subject's doing 59
Figure 14. Thematic roles of the subjects in terms of cognitive and
occurential doing 63
Figure 15. The narrative as determined by actantial and thematic roles 64
Figure 16. The motivation for doing in the narrative 70
Figure 17. Contrasting properties of the subject in two world structures... 72
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This thesis is dedicated to Elefteria whose love, energy, intelligence and forebearance
inspire me and give me the freedom to carry on my dreams.

My sincere thanks to Dr. Wendy Sutton for her generous contribution of time and her
many insightful comments which were truly invaluable.

Thank you also Dr. John Willinsky, Dr. Joe Bélanger and Dr. Kenneth Reeder for their
careful reading, thoughtful questions and many helpful suggestions.
 1

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Dimensions of Text and The Picture Book

The term "text" has evoked various meanings according to particular disciplinary
perspectives. In cognitive psychology, it has been represented as the sum total of the
author's propositions; in semiotics, as the set of lexical, or visual, signs which act as cues
to guide the reader's mental decoding operations. Structuralist theory determined the text to
be "an object endowed with precise properties, that must be analytically isolated" and by
which the "work can be entirely defined on the grounds of such properties" (Levi-Strauss
cited in Eco, 1979, p. 3). Some proponents of poststructuralist theory have examined the
"text" as the substantive equivalent of the author's productivity in the process of
communication as a social exchange of thought (Kristeva, 1969). Others (see Eco, 1976;
1979; Peirce, 1931; Derrida, 1974) have cultivated a notion of "text" where meaning
making on the part of the reader is considered to be a generative movement embodying a
semantic process of infinite regression which negates objective meaning and renders the
written word indeterminant in relation to a seemingly uncontrollable non-metaphysical
networking of interpretations (Noth, 1990). The picture book genre offers an interesting
non-transcendental case for illuminating the dimensions of textual structure and for
exploring the meaning-expressive potential of the lexical and visual forms of signification
embodied in such texts (see Kiefer, 1988).

Even though the picture book possesses the propensity to be a highly unconventional
and experimental literary form (Kiefer, 1988; Lewis, 1990) employing both lexical and
visual systems of signification, the dominant paradigm in educational research of the
picture book genre reflects three types of analyses: 1) pedagogic, where the printed word
supersedes the pictorial aspects of the text as the focus of examination in the meaning-
 2

making process; 2) aesthetic, where the rationale for research is drawn from art criticism
and/or art history toward the pictorial aspects of the text at the expense of the lexical aspects
of the text; and 3) literary, where the picture book is subsumed in the vast oeuvre of
children's literature "as a marginal genre, or a larval stage of literature proper" (Lewis,
1990, p. 140). David Lewis (1990) has identified the metafictive, postmodernist, or non-
mainstream features of the picture book which belie any staid and stagnant notions that
might be possessed about the minimal inventiveness of its authors and illustrators and the
lack of boundary-breaking within the genre. The picture book is essentially an open and
fluid form (Eco, 1979) embodying lexical and visual signs and codes in an unceasing
interaction of word and image and reader (see Lewis, 1990; Kiefer, 1988). Lewis notes
that "An adequate theory of the picture book must directly address the bifurcated nature of
the form (word and pictures) and must account for the whole range of types and kinds
including the metafictive" (1990, p. 141). Because the picture book as a genre is
dependent upon the interaction of two integrated systems of signification, lexical and
visual, it is a unique combination of literary and visual forms which possesses "high
semantic or semiotic capacity" (Landes, 1987, p. 320) and facilitates the creation of
personal cognitive, affective and aesthetic meaning for the reader. It is this semiotic
capacity of the picture book genre which makes it ideal for the purpose of teaching young
children by establishing "contexts for literary and real world understandings" (Kiefer,
1988, p. 260) that merits the focus of educational research. In reconstituting the picture
book (see Lewis, 1990; Kiefer, 1988), it is necessary to step back from the well-worn
research paradigms discussed previously and take another vantage point which, in itself,
will fuse the sometimes disparate pedagogical, literary, and aesthetic aspects of the genre
by explaining the levels of semiotic interaction both within the lexical and visual
components, or "texts", of the picture book and between the picture book and the reader
(see Kiefer, 1988; Lewis, 1990; Eco, 1976; 1979). How does the textual form of the
picture book work, both lexically and visually, as a semiotic system of signs and codes to
create meaning?
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Problem and Purpose of the Present Study

The present study supports the thesis that the textual form of the picture book, as in any
literary or visual artistic work, functions to create meaning (Kiefer, 1988; Lewis, 1990;
Landes, 1987; see also Eco, 1979; Greimas, 1983; Arnheim, 1974). In order to
understand how meaning is created through the unique artistic form of the picture book, it
is essential to identify the basic lexical and visual textual components in the picture book to
create a structural basis for the analysis of their interaction within the medium in the
presence of a reading/viewing consciousness which actualizes the text's meaning potential.
A n explanation of the relationship between the reader and the text is concomitant to
isolating the structural aspects of textual form that function as a vehicle to facilitate the
reader/viewer with visual cues upon which to furnish cognitive, affective and aesthetic
hypotheses thereby allowing the researcher to analyze in semiotic terms the cognitive,
affective and aesthetic as well as conscious and subconscious responses required or
initiated during the reading/viewing process as a meaning-making activity.

For the purpose(s) of the present study, a method of textual analysis incorporating
traditional semiotic techniques (see Eco, 1979; Greimas, 1983; Barthes, 1964) utilized for
the examination of lexical and visual texts has been developed in order to answer the
question: How does the textual form of the picture book work, both lexically and visually,
as a semiotic system of signs and codes to create meaning? The various 'boxes' in Table 1
denote the method of textual analysis described in Chapter Three and are used to identify
the levels of semiotic interaction between the picture book and the reader as well as to
isolate the unique structural aspects of lexical and visual texts within the picture book.
With specific reference to the structural semantics of semiotic techniques for analyzing
lexical and visual texts identified in the method, the emphasis of the analysis is twofold: 1)
upon the examination of the syntactic composition of the picture book as integrated lexical
and visual text(s); and 2) upon the mental operations (cognitive and affective, conscious
and subconscious) required by, or initiated in, the reader by the text as a set of lexical and
visual signs in order to facilitate the creation of meaning and aesthetic response(s).
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Summary of Purposes

1) To identify the structural aspects of lexical and visual systems of signification,

as signs and codes within the picture book which work syntactically and
semantically to create meaning.

2) To explain, in semiotic terms, the interaction between the reader and the picture
book so as to furnish pragmatic (Peirce, 1931) and theoretical explanations of
the reader's (cognitive, affective and aesthetic/conscious and subconscious)
reactions for lexical and pictorial hermeneutics (or acts of interpretation).

3) To identify, explain and demonstrate the use of a method of textual analysis

designed specifically for the research problem which is applicable to the picture
book genre as a whole.

Significance of the Present Study

A recent study of the picture book as "event" focused upon the semiotic dimensions
of the interaction between the reader, or performer, of a text and the listener, or spectator,
of the performance during a class reading (Golden & Gerber, 1990). The researchers were
primarily concerned with studying the effects of paralinguistic cues (performance and
instructional) by the performer upon the subjects' interpretation of the text as an interactive
"social event", rather than utilizing semiotic methodology to explore the dimensions of the
picture book genre, or to identify and explain how the interaction of lexical and visual signs
and codes in the textual form of the picture book functions to create meaning for the
reader/viewer. The present study addresses the need expressed for a structural analysis of
representative works within the genre which would account for the meaning-generating
potential of an overall text comprised of lexical and visual systems of signification that
characterize the bifurcate nature of picture book form (see Lewis, 1990; Kiefer, 1988). To
this end, semiotics offers a highly developed epistemological, theoretical and
methodological framework for deconstructing the structure of lexical and visual signs
embodied in picture books as communicative sign systems, or codes, which function to
convey meaning, thereby affording the researcher the opportunity to examine the text as a
 5

medium for exchanging or disseminating knowledge. This is an essential area of research

if we hope to understand the role of texts in the learning process. Semiotic analysis allows
the researcher: 1) to take into account levels above and below the sign (Greimas, 1983); 2)
to examine the means of signification as well as the content of signification (see Hjelmslev,
1943); 3) to ground the analysis in the text itself and to examine how the structures of
signification are engendered "globally" in codic terms to form systems of signification
(Eco, 1979); and 4) to examine the roles of both the sender (e.g., a text) and of the receiver
(e.g., a reader/viewer) in a pragmatic act of communication (Eco, 1976; 1979).

Outline of the Thesis

Chapter Two reviews literature reflecting areas of epistemological, theoretical and

methodological concern which are relevant to the present study and provides: 1) a
definition of semiotic theory in relation to language, image, and cognition; 2) a discussion
of the similarities and differences between lexical and visual systems of signification as
texts and the key issues of debate regarding the semiotic autonomy of each codic milieu;
and 3) a methodological study of the role of structuralist semantics (see Greimas, 1983) in
semiotic inquiry as required for the study of narrative texts. In Chapter Three, the
characteristic features of the semiotic method of textual analysis are identified and explained
according to its uses for examining reader/viewer cognitive, affective and aesthetic
responses to the picture book as a total lexical and visual textual form (see Table 1).
Chapter Four is a formal semiotic analysis (based upon the method detailed in Chapter
Three) of the lexical component of the picture book relative to the visual text and the role of
the reader/viewer to make sense from the signs and codes which engender the work with
meaning (see Eco, 1979). Chapter Five completes the formal semiotic analysis by
examining the visual text in relation to the lexical text and the total elements of signification
comprising the picture book which the viewer/reader must actualize as meaning-maker.
Chapter Six summarizes and concludes the study.
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CHAPTER TWO

AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL, T H E O R E T I C A L AND M E T H O D O L O G I C A L
F R A M E W O R K F O R SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS O F T H E PICTURE BOOK

Overview

The purpose of this chapter is to facilitate an epistemological, theoretical and

methodological framework for the construction of a method of textual analysis which is
used in the present study to isolate, define and explain the levels of semiotic interaction,
both lexical and visual, between the picture book and the reader. The first half of the
discussion will review the main epistemological and theoretical implications concerning
semiotics, language and pictorial text and will reconcile them in the second half of the
discussion with what has been recognized to be a viable semiotic methodology for textual
analysis. The second half of the discussion, which deals with semiotic methodology, refers
primarily to lexical narrative text; however, the same analytic principles and methodological
rigor can be applied to pictorial text as linear visual narrative (as is also stated in the
chapter).

The Ontology: Prelude to the Faithless Word

The Gospel according to John asserts,

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God
and the Word was God.

The statement concretizes the relationship between language and faith, hence meaning,
since the embodiment of meaning lies ultimately in the oneness of divinity and language, as
 7

an affirmation of faith. Faith in the Word was faith in God. Implicit in this logic is the
absoluteness of truth in the word, and the unequivocal and univocal nature of meaning.
Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of logos was a philosophical consequence of a
lapsed faith in God in an age demarcing spiritual uncertainty and moral relativism,
regarding the true nature of truth. Yet, the ramifications of this declaration strike at the
very heart of human order. Derrida ( 1974) writes,

A l l the metaphysical determinations of truth, and even the one beyond

metaphysical ontotheology that Heidegger reminds us of, are more or less
immediately inseparable from the instance of the logos, or of a reason
thought within the lineage of the logos, in whatever sense it is understood .
. . Within the logos the original and essential link to the phone has never
been broken . . . A s has been more or less implicitly determined, the
essence of the phone would be immediately proximate to that which within
"thought" as logos relates to "meaning", (p. 11)

Traditionally, theology did not and has not questioned God's ordained and absolute power.
How could the church deny faith in the voice of God, as manifest in the Word, to dispute
creation and truth? Theologically, the logicality of the world is seen as preordained and
limited only by the self-contradiction of an omnipotent God. Therefore, no knowledge is
certain because it is out of the realm of the empirical and contingent on God's will: a matter
of faith. What Nietzsche was expressing was essentially a lack of faith in the existence of
God because of a lack of absolutes, or underlying relations of signs, or order, in reality
discernible through reasoned inquiry. For the twentieth century, trusting the Word is
divorced from the reality of what is left—a semiotic limbo.

Language, Sign, and Meaning

The word, whether written or spoken, is a vehicle for the acts of creating meaning
performed in the exchange of thought. What is suspect is the competence of language to
convey meaning. To formulate theories of communication, as is a theory of semiotics or of
 8

literature, one must explore the mechanics of human perception and the affect of language
as referent, accurate or inaccurate, upon the perception process.
Man is a meaning-making animal, ordering and comprehending reality through
language. Cassidy (1982) states,

It is axiomatic that mankind's greatest accomplishment is

language —axiomatic in a semiotic sense. Language permits . . .
communication about objects and events temporally and spatially distant. If
not a prerequisite of thought, it is an exhaustive tool of thought. Language
is a sign system. It re-presents and does so systematically. In written
language, through the application of syntactic, semantic,and pragmatic
rules, arbitrary markings assume meaning on a number of levels, for
example, semantic, phonemic, expressive, (p. 78)

The object, sign production and sign perception (interpreter) constitutes the basic unit of a
semiotic communication model which clearly operationalizes the exchange and coding of
information transactionally. Inherent to the re-presentality of language is the notion of
inference, or as C.S. Peirce (1931) postulated, the concept of interprétant :

A sign stands for something to the idea which produces, or modifies . . .

That for which it stands is called its object; that which it conveys, its
meaning; and the idea to which it gives rise, its interprétant. (p.339)

The interprétant validates the sign, even in the absence of an interpreter, because it is a
construct arising from contact with an object in the external world.
Theorists with an interest in Semiotics (Hjelmslev, 1943; Peirce, 1931; Dewey, 1922;
Greimas, 1983; Eco, 1976; Barthes, 1964; Derrida, 1974; Lotman, 1990) have asserted the
belief that perception in itself is the interpretation of disconnected sensory data and the
creation of cognitive hypotheses based upon individual experience. Yet, above simple
cognition as the physical mechanisms underlying thought and symbol manipulation, or
mechanics of thought (Hunt, 1978; 1979), lies the representational level of
theorizing —content of thought (Hunt and Agnoli, 1991). Piaget (1970) has given a
 9

semiotic rendering of the mental image as the "interiorized imitation" (p. 14) and
transformation of reality and stresses that "without semiotic means it would be impossible
to think at all" (Piaget & Inhelder, 1966, p. 381). The ability to represent mentally an
object in the external world as an inner image, or interprétant, becomes a semiotic
instrument necessary in order to evoke and to think what has been perceived. The sign
presupposes a mental differentiation between its signifier and the signified. Signs are not
things or objects, but correlations between expression and content, so that we are
essentially concerned with sign-functions instead of signs (Hjelmslev, 1943; Eco, 1976;
Greimas, 1983). A sign-function occurs when a certain expression is correlated to a
particular context and these correlations are culturally created, thus, implying artificiality or
convention. The issue of similitude between sign and object is misleading because
univocality is an unrealistic expectation in semiosis, which is unlimited and multivariate
(Eco, 1984; Peirce, 1931). There are no universal truths because meaning is transitory and
often provisionally bound in culturally determined semantic fields. For example, a sign-
function operates in every lie to signify something not of or true to the external world. The
given code enables the interpreter to understand sign-functions that are false. Ultimately,
the content of an expression is not an object but a cultural unit. If we know the proper code
of correlations between expression and content, we can understand signs. Language, then,
is a semiotic system embodying artificial and conventional sign-meaning correlations
(Hjelmslev, 1943; Barthes, 1970; Greimas, 1983; Eco, 1976; Lotman, 1990).

Images and Signs: Iconicity and Language

A semiotic typology of images includes five distinct classes: 1) graphic (pictures,

statues and designs); 2) optical (mirrors and projections); 3) perceptual (sense data) 4)
mental (dreams, memories and ideas); and S)verbal (metaphor and descriptions) (Mitchell,
1986). The traditional semiotic definition of an image is rooted in distinguishing its
features based on resemblance:
 10

The sign brings separate instances (subject-object on one hand, subject-

interlocutor on the other) back to a unified whole (a unity which presents
itself as a sentence-message), replacing praxis with a single meaning
and difference with resemblance . .. the relationship instituted by the sign
will therefore be a reconciliation of discrepancies, and identification of
differences. (Kristeva, 1969, p.26)

The concept of image, defined semiotically as resemblance, however, refers to "visual"

phenomenon and their mental representations (as defined above) and does not cover a
broader spectrum of sign production including transmission through non-visual channels
(e.g., spoken language) (Nôth, 1990). In order to account for resemblance beyond visual
representation, iconicity, or the extent to which a sign vehicle is similar to its denotatum, or
referent, is a criteria for examination. According to Morris (1946),

A sign is iconic to the extent to which it itself has the properties of its
denotata . . . Iconicity is thus a matter of degree . . . A portrait of a person
is to a considerable extent iconic, but it is not completely so since the
painted canvas does not have the texture of the skin, or the capacities for
speech and motion, which the person portrayed has. The motion picture is
more iconic, but again not completely so. A completely iconic sign
would always denote, since it would itself be a denotatum (pp. 98-99).

Can language represented graphically be iconic according to Morris' (1946) definition?

WRITING READING or READING WRITING

Literary competence (meaning linguistic competence as Iser, 1978, defines it) is a

natural prerequisite for deciphering written text; however, the superficiality of this type of
competence is that it lacks a reasoned explication of meaning-making. It is an ends-means,
means-ends dichotomy. The demise of logocentricity, the deflation of the spoken word
and the inflation of the written, places undue emphasis upon written text. Derrida (1974)
1

comments,
 11

I believe . . . that a certain sort of question about the meaning and origin of
writing precedes, or at least merges with, a certain type of question about
the meaning and origin of techniques. That is why the notion of technique
can never simply clarify the notion of writing (p. 8).

The understanding of technique, as graphic linguistic expression, cannot therefore ensure

the understanding of writing. For, if literary competence were the sole proprietor of
meaning, language would be self-referential and the sole-appropriator. Is the reading
process mere mental mimesis of the language itself expressed as literary competence, or the
decoding of signs of signs, semiotically unlimited through free and variated association?
Eco(1984) explains the generative function of the linguistic sign within a text,

A text is not simply a communicational apparatus. It is a device which

questions the previous signifying systems, often renews them, and
sometimes destroys them . . . The ability of the textual manifestations to
empty, destroy, or reconstruct preexisting sign-functions depends on the
presence within the sign-functions (that is the network of content figures) of
a set of instructions oriented toward the (potential) production of different
texts (p.25).

A dialectical relationship between reader and text is suggested, since, the words, divorced
from the writer as marks on paper devoid of meaning, demand a reader to actualize their
meaning potential. It is not however a rewriting of the text. The act of reading is the re-
creation, or synthesis, of constructs referential to certain artificial and conventional signs,
which in themselves, have no meaning or function, until assimilated through a reading
consciousness. In essence, a reading act is a re-reading act striving to reformulate, in
personal terms, an already reformulated reality. The problem of meaning and essence of a
written text arises. The intangibility of objective meaning renders the literary work an
imaginary object. Ineffable and non-static, it does not occupy the same spatio-temporal
domain of ordinary experience and is to some extent metaphysical in that it exists as a
mental state, event or construct in the mind of a reader. Consequently, the accessibility of
the work determines aesthetic analysis and is the basis for critical perspectives. This is a
 12

given in critical enquiry. We experience related ideas, emotions, and psychic states
through the act of reading, but are distanced from authorial purpose, or intervention, as
incorporated in the work. Iser (1978) attempted to reconcile the notion of iconism and the
graphic representation of language in literature:

The iconic signs of literature constitute an organization of signifiers which

do not designate a signified object, but instead designate instructions for
the production of the signified . . . The iconic signs fulfill their function to
the degree in which their relatedness to identifiable objects begins to fade
or is even blotted out. For now something has to be imagined which the
sign has not denoted—though it will be preconditioned by that which they
do denote. Thus, the reader is compelled to transform a denotation into a
connotation (p.65-66).

The connotative terms Iser (1978) alludes to are recreative concepts aiding the grasp of
similarities among particulars perceived in reality, not objects. Knowing the terms of
signification of a written expression is not infallible because truth, or knowledge, is based
in a perception of reality and not reality itself (see Dewey, 1922; Eco, 1976). Yet, the
denotative function is an unfortunate choice of terminology by Iser because denotation
commands as a codifying equivalent the "rigidification and death of all sense" (Eco, 1984,
p. 25). To universalize meaning denotatively, as referred to in resemblance, supreme
responsibility for meaning signification rests in the text, and not in the reader; since, the
sign-function, or correlation between the content-form and the expression-form of a sign,
must determine the response (Hjelmslev, 1943) and denote one meaning. Ultimately, this
is a limitation upon intertextuality, or experiences of different texts, and extratextuality, or
external experience, which nourish the generation of new contexts from which meaning is
created (Eco, 1984). In Iser's (1978) argument, it is implied that words are the equivalent
of iconic signs. If the iconic sign is evaluated in the context of a true sign, there can be no
analogous, motivational or natural relationship between the object and the signifier
(Eco, 1976: 1984). If indeed words are icons, as Iser (1978) suggests, what are they icons
of—other words? The notion of iconism is tautological in this case; since, the sign can
 13

never truly and completely possess the same properties as the object which it signifies, and
of which we have no true knowledge, only perception. The relatedness and non-
relatedness of the iconic sign is contradicted in the argument Iser (1978) puts forward and
the implication is that words are stimuli for conditioned responses to specific "signifieds",
as expressed by the definite article in "the signified". Furthermore, it is assumed we all
perceive the same objective reality.

Semiotics and the Autonomy of Pictorial Text

Given that pictorial texts are no less polysemous, or able to generate more than a single
meaning (Barthes, 1964; Prieto, 1966; Eco, 1968), than lexical texts, semiotics has
functioned to limit the interpretive openness of pictorial texts (Nôth, 1990). The central
question regarding semiotics and pictures (in its broadest sense) has been focused on the
extent of autonomy of pictorial text in relation to linguistic text: "Is an autonomous
semiotics of pictorial perception possible, or does the semiotic analysis of pictures always
require recourse to the model of language?" (Nôth, 1990, p. 450).
The suggestion for a pictorial grammar (Metz, 1968; Eco, 1976; Saint-Martin, 1987)
has been derived from the fact that pictures have no unique visual metalanguage and,
therefore, require language as an instrument for pictorial analysis. Arguing from a
logocentric viewpoint, Barthes (1964) has focused the question on the relationship between
lexical and visual elements incorporated into the same text:

Images . . . can signify . . . but never autonomously; every semiotical

system has its linguistic admixture. Where there is a visual substance, for
example, the meaning is confirmed by being duplicated in a linguistic
message . . . so that at least a part of the iconic message is . . . either
redundant or taken up by the linguistic system . . . Does the image duplicate
certain of the informations given in the text by a phenomenon of redundancy
or does the text add a fresh information to the image? (p. 10; 38)
 14

The lexical-visual relationship in a text is more complex than is suggested in the question;
however, Barthes' (1964) concepts of anchorage and relay are useful in considering how
this "combined code" type of text may generate and guide meaning semiotically. In
anchorage "the text directs the reader through the signifieds of the image, causing him to
avoid some and receive others . . . It remote-controls him toward meaning chosen in
advance", whereas, in relay "the text and image stand in a complementary relationship; the
words in the same way as the images, are fragments of a more general syntagm and the
unity of the message is realized at a higher level" (Barthes, 1964, p. 40-41). In order to
facilitate meaning, the message as a whole involves both the lexical-visual dependency of
anchorage and the complimentarity of both textual constituents found in relay. With
reference to an advertisement for pasta, Barthes (1964) demonstrated the interdependence
of lexical and visual signs within the same text. The objects depicted in the advertisement
(spaghetti, tomato sauce, grated Parmesan cheese, onions, peppers, and a string bag) can
be grouped under the one lexical term used as a label /Panzani/. Not that these products are
exclusive to a particular ethnicity, but in culinary terms, the ingredients for the "complete
spaghetti dish" are represented in the photograph as uniquely Italian. Since the
advertisement was designed for the French consumer, and not the Italian consumer, the
ethnic connotation of the name is particularly effective in establishing a thematically
meaningful context for the intended audience. The "Italianicity" of the products depends
chiefly on a contiguous, or adjoined, relation between the word /Panzani/ and the products
depicted in order to achieve the transference of connotation from the lexical to the visual
text, thereby, resulting in anchorage and relay. "Is there any semiotically relevant preverbal
level of visual perception and analysis?" (Noth, 1990, p. 450).

Proponents for the semiotic autonomy of pictures (see Sonesson, 1989) have objected
that the commentaries of multimedia contexts (such as Barthes' analysis of the Panzani
advertisement) have not asserted the semiotic priority of the lexical over the visual message.
The theory of visual perception, or Gestalt Theory, has been cited to justify the belief in
language-independent entities interpreted as semiotic elements of visual cognition
(Sonesson, 1989; Krampen, 1973; Mateescu, 1974; Arnheim, 1974). According to the
 15

Gestalt theory of perception, the perceiving organism obtains visual data from the
environment by scanning the visual field. Gestalten, or organized forms, are generated as
holistic perceptual structures of invariant shapes, or figures, which tend to contrast against
the larger background of a visual field. Interpreting gestalten as signs and extending the
argument from the expressive plane, concerning form, to the content plane, concerning
meaning, Arnheim (1974) stated that "no visual pattern is only itself. It always represents
something beyond its own individual existence—which is like saying that all shape is the
form of some content" (p. 65). The implication being that pictorial signs are autotelic in
creating meaning independently without recourse to language, and unlike lexical signs,
through the form of their expression. Can a semiotics of visual language be developed in
accordance with the levels of grammar of language and reveal essential structural
components of pictures?

A Question of Articulation

Articulation means structuring and it has often been considered to be the main
distinguishing feature of language. In language, there is a two-fold structuring, or double
articulation (Hjelmslev, 1943; Martinet, 1949; Prieto, 1966), by two unit types:
morphemes, or minimal units of meaning within a message (e.g., syllables or words) and
phonemes, or differentiating phonetic signifiers (the corresponding units of written
language are graphemes ). For example, a word such as in-act-ive is composed of
distinguishable units of meaning at the level of first articulation. The second level of
articulation structures the phonetic (or graphic) signifiers of the morphemes into
nonsignifying but differentiated units. Hjelmslev (1943) went further in separating the
two planes of articulation into expression and content where the expression plane
combines both phonemes and morphemes while the content plane is comprised of
conceptual units of sense (Noth, 1990), or semes. Extralinguistic variables, or purports,
such as the phonetic potential of the human voice (on the expression plane) and the
amorphous mass of human thought (on the content plane) are considered by Hjelmslev
 16

(1943) as substantive influences on the form of expression and content in language (see
also Greimas, 1966; Eco, 1976; 1984). Thus, the form and content of language are
inextricably bound to those human variables which determine its substance and the
circumstances of its production and perception.
The case for second articulation in pictorial text has been a point of contention among
semioticians. Gestalten have been interpreted as supersigns (Krampen, 1973), or holistic
elements which are products of information processing, consisting of integrated subsigns
within a pictorial whole (Saint-Martin, 1987). Hierarchical levels of perception in
supersigns are postulated to extend "from a differential optical element, a geometrical
morpheme, a partial image of a signifying object to an iconic phrase and discourse" (Noth,
1990, p.451). On a more esoteric level, the possibility of pictorial second articulation has
also been argued and identified in terms of figurae (Barthes, 1964; Prieto, 1966; Eco,
1968; Metz, 1968), or distinctive but not meaningful units of visual perception
corresponding to phonemes (or graphemes) on the expression plane. These stimulus
invariants to visual perception are defined by natural laws in relation to the environmental
sources of their production and the resulting effect upon the psychology of the viewer
(e.g., figure-ground relations, light contrast, geometrical elements, etc.). Figurae in turn
aggregate to constitute signs (comparable to the morpheme) and form semata (or visual
"propositions") as total iconic statements. The presence of double articulation in pictures
at the second level has been questioned by citing the argument that the figurae level merges
with the sign level and the sign level with the semata level to create pictorial meaning (see
Sonesson, 1989). Further research on pictorial texts (see Eco, 1976) has proposed that
specific rules of pictorial segmentation can only be determined within individual pictorial
contexts and that "iconic text is an act of code-making " (Eco, 1976, p. 213). This
approach emphasizes the differences and the similarities between pictorial and verbal
representation (Goodman, 1968). Saint-Martin (1987) presents a convincing case in
support of a visual syntax of pictorial language by incorporating features of the arguments
posed to the contrary within a semiotic theory of visual text. For example, the coloreme is
postulated as the basic visual element (corresponding to the phonemic level in language)
 17

which functions to differentiate meaningful visual elements, even though, meaning

signifying potential is absent. The aggregate of coloremes, on a more surface than "deep"
level, constituting the dot, the line and combinations of the two elements, are considered to
lack intrinsic meaning, however, as particular constituents of a pictorial text these elements
(as aggregates of color agglomerations) form distinctive features of an object, or objects,
within the pictorial plane (Prieto, 1966; Saint-Martin, 1987; Sonesson, 1989) and gain
meaning as formal gestalten. Ultimately, the syntactic analysis which Saint-Martin (1987)
provides attempts to furnish hypotheses for a scientific analytical approach to large
aggregates of coloremes as non-linear but correlational schemata based upon constant
interaction of plastic and perceptual variables found in a pictorial text and the viewer. The
result is effective because Gestalt Theory, colorematic analysis and semiotic principles are
combined to examine the visual language of pictorial text, at once, as structural entity and a
supersyntagm, or a total unit of sense.

Structuralism, Semantics and Text: A Methodological Study

Structuralism in linguistics (see Saussure, 1916) has influenced A . J. Greimas'

semiotic methodology of text analysis as detailed in Structural semantics (1983). The
method itself has become the core technique of semiotic text analysis of the influential
"School of Paris" (see Barthes, 1970; Greimas, 1983; Derrida, 1974). The theory is
founded upon the premise of the existence of a semantic universe or "the totality of
significations, postulated as prior to articulation" (Greimas & Courtes, 1982, p. 361). The
semantic universe embodied in a natural language is too vast to conceive in its totality; thus,
any discourse presupposes a semantic universe, on a micro-scale, that is actualized in part
as discourse and that "can be defined as the set of the system of values" (also p. 361).
Meaning is achieved through articulation of such a micro-scale semantics and can be
described "by means of elementary axiological structures according to the categories of
life/death (individual universe), or nature/culture (collective universe)" (Greimas, 1970, p.
 18

xvi). These arbitrary universals are the starting point for analysis of the semantic universe
yet can never be isolated in pure form, but only when articulated. Greimas (1970)
explains,

. . . the production of meaning is meaningful only if it is the transformation

of a meaning already given; the production of meaning is, consequently, in
itself, a signifying endowing with form, indifferent to the contents to be
transformed. Meaning, in the sense of the form of meaning, can thus be
defined as the possibility of transforming meaning (p. 15).

Defining the text as a discoursive micro-universe, places the text in the position of
autonomy excluded from extralinguisitic phenomena in text analysis. The organization of
discoursive structures as narrative creates a distinction between two levels of representation
and analysis: a manifest, or surface level and an immanent, or "deep" level.

SEMANTIC
IMMANENCE MANIFESTATION SIGNIFICATION

seme lexeme sememe

minimal content unit lexical manifestation meaning signifier

(deep level) (surface) (polysemous)

Figure 1. Types and levels of semantic analysis.

This principle can be applied to other systems not necessarily dependent upon natural
language (e.g., cinema, painting, architecture, sculpture, etc.) in order to isolate and
explain the structural aspects of the medium as text. For example, in attempting to bring to
light the interrelations between the structural elements constituting a pictorial text (e.g.,
color, texture, form, composition, etc.) and, thereby, isolate and explain the means of
signification as well as the content, it is possible to avoid speculation and ground the
 19

analysis within the structural aspects of the text itself. The analysis can then be extended to
examining the role of the viewer in relation to the production of the text (Eco, 1976; 1984).
Greimas' linguistic framework is based on Saussure's (1916) concept of difference
(see Derrida, 1974), or the notion of binary oppositions and distinctiveness of functional
phonology as presence and absence, and the glossematic sign model (see Appendix A ) of
Hjelmslev (1943). Structural lexicology forms the basis for the semantic analysis of
textual structures (Noth, 1990). Semiotics, according to Greimas and Courtes (1979), is
operational as a theory of signification "when it situates its analyses on levels both higher
and lower than the sign" (p. 147).

Generative Trajectory

Syntactic Semantic
Component Component

Deep
FUNDAMENTAL SYNTAX F U N D A M E N T A L SEMANTICS

Semiotic and level

narrative
structures
Surface
SURFACE NARRATIVE SYNTAX NARRATIVE SEMANTICS
levels

DISCOURSIVE SYNTAX DISCOURSIVE SEMANTICS

Discoursive Discoursivization Thematization

structures Actorialization
Temporalization Figurativization
Spatialization

Figure 2. The two levels of the theory of narrativity.

 20

On the lower level, semes, or the minimal unit of semantic componential analysis,
function to differentiate significations and form semic systems subdivided into semic
categories. On the higher levels, are textual units which produce semantic entities greater
then signs. Perron (cited from Greimas, 1988) explains the model of generative discourse
analysis as defined by generative trajectory,

. . . generative trajectory designates the way in which the components and

sub-components fit together and are linked together. Three autonomous
general areas: semio-narrative structures, discoursive structures and textual
structures have been identified within the general economy of the theory
first to construct the ab quo instance of the generation of signification
where semantic substance is first articulated and constituted into a signifying
form, and then to set up the intermediate mediating stages which transform
the semantic substance into the last instances ad quern where signification is
manifested (p. xviii).

Discourse production through developing stages, each containing a syntactic and a semantic
subcomponent (see Figure 2), is postulated as beginning at a "deep" level with elementary
structures and extending over more complex structures at higher levels "which govern
organization of the discourse prior to its manifestation in a given natural language"
(Greimas & Courtes, 1979, p. 85; see also Hjelmslev, 1943). Manifest textual structures
of expression (linear or spatial, phonetic, written or visual) are external to generative
trajectory.
At the level of discoursive structures, the seme forms the "deepest" and most
elementary structure of signification, however, it is a theoretical postulate and must be
considered as such. Greimas (1983) explains,

This minimal unit, however, which we have called seme, has no existence
on its own and can be imagined and described only in relation to something
that is not, inasmuch as it is only part of a structure of signification.
By situating the seme within perception, in a place where significations
are constituted, we noticed that it received there a kind of existence because
of its participation in two signifying ensembles at the same time: the seme,
indeed is affirmed by disjunction within the semic categories, and it is
confirmed by junction with other semes within semic groupings which we
have called semic figures and bases (p. 118).
 21

It is a minimalist definition of structure where primacy is given to relations between

elements based on difference (Noth, 1990). For example, the difference between son
and daughter at the lexical level is due to the disjunction characterized metalinguistically
by the features male and female as part of a semic hierarchy of the content-substance sense
(see Appendix A). The common semic category of the two features, sex, presupposes any
semantic resemblance or conjunction between the two features and sets the ground from
which the articulation of signification emerges (Greimas, 1983). A linear semantic axis
with the differential terms male and female would represent the semes involved as
elementary structures of signification. A semantic axis may have different articulations, or
lexical fields, in different languages, thus, transforming the content-form at the word level.
The "deep" level is organized in the visual representation of the semiotic square "where the
substance of content is articulated and constituted as form of content" (Perron cited from
Greimas, 1988, p. xviii):

(Assertion) (Negation)
(e.g. male) (e.g. female)

contrariety

(Non-assertion) (Non-negation)
(e.g. non-female) (e.g. non-male)

Figure 3. The semiotic square.

 22

The oppositions constituting semantic axes may be represented in the semiotic square as
two types of logical relations: contradiction, or the relation existing between two terms of
the binary category assertion/negation, and contrariety, or the implied contrariness of one
term with the other. For example, the seme s , "male", is described as the opposition ( in
t

terms of presence or absence) of non-Sj ( Sj ), "non-male", in which the seme "male" is

absent. The contrary of s l5 "male", is s , "female", which expands the square to a four
2

term constellation to include the contrary of s which is non-s ( s ) , "non-female".

2 2 2

Complimentarity or implication now appears between the terms Sj and s or s and Sj:
2 2

"male" implies "non-female" and "female" implies "non-male" (see Greimas, 1970). The
"deep" structural nature of the semiotic square can be seen in the fact that there may be no
lexical equivalent at the surface levels of manifestation to express "non-male" or "non-
female" as concepts (Nôth, 1990). Therefore, the fundamental semantics at the "deep"
level contains the necessary semantic categories that form the elementary structures of
signification and the fundamental syntax consisting of the relations and transformations
which derive and constitute those structures (see Figure 2).

Discourse and Narrative

Enunciation mediates between the semiotic narrative structures, organized as a series of

strata along the entire generative trajectory, and their actualization in discourse produced by
an enunciator. The discoursive structures manifest the surface semiotic structures and set
them into discourse by making them pass through the domain of enunciation (Greimas,
1988). A s Perron (cited from Greimas, 1988) notes, "It is the place where, by becoming
actualized as operations, the semio-narrative structures make up the competence of the
subject of enunciation" (p. xix). "Charged with the discoursivization of the narrative
structures and comprising of three sub-components of actorialization, temporalization and
 23

spatialization" (Greimas & Courtes, 1979, p. 134), the syntactic component is joined with
a semantic component and "its sub-components of thematization and figurativization"
(ibid., p. 134). A t the surface level, narrative semantics subsumes the semantic values
selected from the deep level of structure (see Figure 2) that are actualized in the form of
lexical actants which, in turn, operate at the level of narrative syntax (e.g., as subject,
object, predicate, etc.) (Greimas & Courtes, 1979) as part of a narrative syntagm (or a
larger discoursive unit, e.g., a sentence or discourse).
In essence, the lexicology of the text is built both horizontally on a syntagmatic axis
consisting of formal structural elements within a text (be it a word, sentence, or narrative
tract) and vertically on a paradigmatic axis where possible substitutions between linguistic
elements occupying the same structural position within the same expressive context may
occur (e.g., the phoneme /s/ being substituted for /g/ in the lexeme /go/ to make /so/). The
juxtaposition of structural elements in a text, at the interpretive level, occurs in relation to
syntagmatic indexes (e.g., contradiction, graphic codes, discontinuity, repetition,
inconsistency, superfluity, non-verisimilitude, etc.) (Todorov, 1977). Paradigmatic
indexes, at the interpretive level, may consist of: 1) intertextual paradigms refering to
cultural conventions of human behavior and psychology established external to the text
(e.g., characterization, event and discourse); or 2) internalized paradigms constructed
from within the text by connecting two or more syntagmatically linked indexes of
interpretation refering exclusively to the "textual world" (Todorov, 1977; Greimas, 1970;
Kristeva, 1969; Eco, 1979). Thus, a text is said "to mean": 1) lexically at the syntagmatic
and paradigmatic levels due to organization and substitution, respectively; and 2)
thematically, by the syntagmatic and paradigmatic conjunctions and disjunctions created at
the levels of organization and substitution, within and without the text, resulting in
interpretive indexes. The second set are extensional operations that go beyond the
conscious decoding of lexical meaning as a communicative act intended to realize the virtual
possibilities of language, or intensional operations, and into the realm of activating possible
worlds by determining the coherence and plausibility of the vision. For example, the
representation of a character or event may be incorporated into the syntagmatic structure of
 24

the plot and fabula constituting the text, yet, at the paradigmatic level have no intertextual,
or cultural validity, and be relevant only to the textual world as an intratextual paradigm.
Mythological or fairy tale genres refer to creatures such as dragons, ghosts and goblins that
are unrealistic in a cultural sense because they do not exist in the external world; however,
within the world of fairy tales and mythology, as determined by the story and fabula within
specific genres, dragons, ghosts and goblins are perfectly plausible and realistic characters.
It is at this point that actors (like these characters) are formed as the result of genre function
and influences upon the form and perception of narrative utterance.

Isotopy

Isotopy describes the coherence and homogeneity of text which allows for the semantic
concatenation, or chain-linking, of utterances (Greimas & Courtes, 1979). In order to
semantically disambiguate terms within a text and assure textual coherence and
homogeneity, there must be iterativity, or recurrence, of a classeme (either semic category
or repeated contextual seme) which connects the semantic elements of discourse
(sememes). Eco (1984) explains,

The term isotopy designated d'abord, a phenomenon of semic iterativity

throughout a syntagmatic chain; thus any syntagm (be it a phrase, a
sentence, a sequence of sentences composing a narrative text)
comprehending at least two content figurae (in Hjelmslev's sense) is to be
considered as the minimal context for a possible isotopy. (p. 190)

On a semantic level, Greimas (1983) uses two expressions le chien aboye (the dog barks)
and le commissaire aboye (the commissioner barks) (p. 81) to illustrate that aboye (barks)
has two classemes, human and canine. It is the presence of the subjects, the dog or the
commissioner, that reiterates one of the two classemes and establishes the contextual
selection for a literal or figurative reading of the text. A syntagmatic extension of an
isotopy is constituted by the textual segments that are connected by one classeme.
 25

Ultimately, a "text" which fosters a single interpretation in its semantic structure is a simple
isotopy, whereas, bi-isotopy is the result of textual ambiguities or metaphorical elements
that promote polysemous readings. Pluri- or poly-isotopy is the superimposition of
multiple semantic levels in a text ( Eco, 1984; Nôth, 1990).
The first stage of the theory considered: 1) syntactical (grammarial) isotopies; 2)
semantic isotopies; 3) actorial isotopies; 4) partial isotopies (or smaller textual units that are
"condensed" into a text as the result of summarizing macropositions); and 5) global
isotopies (as the result of partial isotopies) (Eco, 1984). The second stage incorporates
recurrent thematic and figurative categories where the typology of isotopies is extended to
semiological isotopies covering iterativities in terms of exteroceptive)' (refering to
properties of the external world) (see Greimas, 1983).

Function and Actantial Structures

Traditional motif research in narrative has considered actors (on two levels as
characters, in anthropomorphic or zoomorphic forms, and lexical subjects, or actants, of
discourse within a sentence engaged in a thematic role), items (or objects) and incidents as
minimal units of narrative analysis (Greimas & Courtes, 1979). Propp (1928), however,
identified the minimal unit of narrative analysis as the Junction in terms of an action which
"cannot be defined apart from its place in the context of narration" (p. 21). Nôth (1990)
explains,

Functions as units of action are narrative invariants, while the agents

performing those actions are textual variables. Within his corpus of one
hundred fairy tales, Propp discovered a relatively small number of thirty-
one such invariant functions, as opposed to a large number of persons,
objects or events (corresponding to the traditional motif) (p. 371).

For example, after the "initial situation" is established in a narrative text, a series of
functions may be cited to explain the narrative syntax and progression of the fabula (story)
 26

(see Appendix C). The thirty-one functions are distributed across seven spheres of action
as performed by various characters such as 1) the villain 2) the donor 3) the helper 4) the
sought-for person 5) the dispatcher 6) the hero 7) the false hero (cf. Greimas, 1983, p.
201). From Propp (1928), Souriau (1950; see Greimas, 1983) and Tesnier (1959; see
Greimas, 1983), Greimas (1966) formulated a "mythical" model of narrative actants
containing three binary oppositions: 1) subject vs. object 2) sender vs. receiver 3) helper
vs. opponent.

sender object —• receiver [knowledge]

Î [ t desire]
helper —» subject « - opponent [power]

Figure 4. A "mythical" model of actantial structure.

Essentially, the fabula (or story elements of the narrative) and every other narrative
structure is reduced to purely formal positions as actants (defined lexically as that which
accomplishes or undergoes an act e.g., subject-object, sender and receiver, and narratively
as classifications of an actor according to genre) which produce actantial roles (Greimas,
1966; Greimas, 1979; Eco, 1979). The syntactic order of the actantial categories
correspond to "a subject wants an object, encounters an opponent, finds a helper, obtains
the object from a sender, and gives it to a receiver" (Noth, 1990', p.372) sequence or
variations thereof. The narrative utterance (NU) is, therefore, defined as a process
composed of a function (F), in the Proppian sense, and an actant (A), or NU=F(A)
(Greimas, 1983; 1979). The logic of relationships is based upon "knowledge", "desire"
and "power" where the transmission of a message can be analyzed syntactically as the
transferal of "knowledge" and the drama of the acquisition of "power" ("desire" being the
motivating force behind the action).
 27

The helper-opponent dichotomy was later abandoned (see Greimas, 1970) as a major
actantial category and the value transfer occurring among the major actants explained as
relationships of conjunction and disjunction according to the semiotic square. Following
from the latter model, a narrative sequence can then be said to begin with a relation of
conjunction between two actants (subject or object), followed by a disjunction (as a
problem or transition phase) which is reconciled in the redistribution of semantic values as

a new conjunction (Greimas, 1970): 1) initial state —> transition —» final state; or 2)

problem —> final stage (see Todorov, 1977). Time and causality are the basic dimensions

of the narrative process (Ricoeur, 1983) that suggest a linear macrostructure, or overall
sequence. Although, the semantic connection between the initial event and the final event
may also suggest a cyclical model such as the following containing four phases beginning
with either a state of deficiency or a satisfactory state (Bremond, 1970, p. 251):

Satisfactory
state

Procedure of Procedure of
improvement degradation

State of
deficiency

Figure 5. Bremond's narrative cycle.

Summary

The focus of this chapter has been to review an epistemological, theoretical and
methodological framework which is utilized to facilitate the construction of a method for the
semiotic analysis of the picture book in order to isolate and explain the semiotic interaction
 28

between the text and the reader/viewer as motivated by both the lexical and visual aspects of
textual form. To this end, the scope of this review has been pragmatic in the selection of
sources relevant to the discussion and not exhaustive in the sense of closing the door to
further discussion. In summary, the following issues have been addressed in chapter two:
1) a coherent definition of semiosis has been presented; 2) the cognitive, affective and
aesthetic implications of semiosis with respect to language and meaning have been
addressed (e.g., iconicity and mental representation); 3) a definition of "image" and its
implication with respect to lexical and pictorial text has been posited; 4) the structural
aspects of lexical and pictorial texts have been outlined, compared and contrasted with
respect to semiotics; and 5) workable, tested, and recognized semiotic methodologies (Eco,
1976; 1979; Greimas, 1983; Barthes, 1964; Saint-Martin, 1987) for examining the
structural as well as the interpretive aspects of both lexical and pictorial texts have been
discussed.
 29

CHAPTER THREE

A M E T H O D FOR T H E SEMIOTIC
ANALYSIS OF T H E PICTURE BOOK

Overview

The purpose of Chapter Three is to outline the semiotic method of textual analysis
which is applied to representative works of the picture book genre in Chapter Four and
Chapter Five for the purpose(s) of the study (as stated in Chapter One). With specific
reference as to how the lexical and visual elements comprising the unique textual form of
the picture book work syntactically and semantically to create a complex system of codes,
the method is used to identify and to explain in semiotic terms the interaction between
lexical and visual texts in the picture book and between the picture book and the reader.

Definitions and Features of a Method: Some Assumptions

The epistemological, theoretical and methodological principles of structural semantics

(see Eco, 1979; Greimas, 1983) incorporated within the method in Chapter Three provide
the basic tools and metalanguage for the semiotic analysis of "text" (as discussed in Chapter
Two) and are useful only to the extent that they allow for the phenomena being studied to
be accounted for in terms comprehensible to the human intellect (Eco, 1979). It is in this
sense that a methodological structuralism as operational procedure for analyzing lexical and
visual texts is necessary because without the metalanguage required, there would be no
way to achieve the purpose(s) of semiotic inquiry relevant to the study of the picture book
form as outlined in Chapter One (see also Eco, 1976; Noth, 1990). A semiotic method of
textual analysis is therefore considered to encompass metatextual means or devices (e.g., a
 30

metalanguage, a "model", figures or other visual schemata, etc.) which conceptualize in

hypothetical, rather than empirical, terms the intensions and extensions made by the
reader/viewer in the act of meaning-making relative to the lexical and visual structures of
signification manifest in the picture book form. Intensional responses are defined as the
consciously motivated acts of meaning-making required of, or initiated in, the
reader/viewer to realize the signifying potential of the total text. Extensional, or not
consciously motivated, acts are defined as those performed in relation to the signifying
structures which constitute the text but are determined extratextually by contextual factors
which influence lexical and visual sign perception in the pragmatic act of communication
(e.g., culture, education, competence, etc.). A model reader/viewer (Eco, 1979) who can
apprehend fully the intensional and extensional structure of the picture book form is
postulated as an integral feature of the semiotic method detailed in Chapter Three for the
purpose(s) of the analyses conducted in this study.

The model and method of textual analysis of lexical narrative text and the role of the
reader proposed by Eco (1979) (adapted from Petofi, 1973, and incorporating the structural
semantics of Greimas, 1983) forms the basic epistemological, theoretical and
methodological foundation from which the framework for the lexical component of the
method outlined in Chapter Three is drawn. Eco's (1979) method, however, is expanded
and adapted (see Table 1) to include semiotic aspects of visual text manifest linearly in the
picture book as a narrative progression. A feature and function of visual text relevant to the
specific research purpose(s) of this study (as outlined in Chapter One). Like Eco's (1979)
model, the position of the individual 'boxes' which comprise the visual representation of
the method in Table 1 of Chapter Three does not preclude to any suggestions of an
hierarchy of levels encompassing the method of analysis itself or to a sequential ordering of
the reader/viewer's intensional and extensional responses to the textual form, but addresses
metalinguistically the levels of possible abstraction at which meaning-making occurs. Eco

(1979) explains this misleading aspect of semiotic method in textual analysis,

The notion of textual level is a very embarrassing one. Such as it appears,

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in its linear manifestation, a text has no levels at all . . . 'level' and

'generation' are two metaphors: the author is not 'speaking', he has
'spoken'. What we are faced with is a textual surface, or the expression
plane of the text. It is not proved that the way we adopt to actualize this
expression as content mirrors (upside down) that adopted by the author to
produce the final result. Therefore, the notion of textual level is merely
theoretical; it belongs to semiotic metalanguage, (p. 13)

Table 1 is intended not as a guide to hierarchical levels of lexical and visual text or to a 'step
series' of acts or responses which the reader/viewer may actualize in relation to the
signifying structures of the picture book form, but to reveal and to reinforce the
interdependence among the metatextual 'boxes' in detailing a semiotic method for textual
analysis (see Eco, 1979). The only way in which the method depicted in Table 1 provides
a concrete case for textual interpretation is the fact that all intensional and extensional
performed by the reader/viewer are actualized in relation to the linear lexical/visual
manifestation of the picture book such as it appears linguistically and visually in lexematic
and colorematic surface form (Eco, 1976; 1979; Saint-Martin, 1987). In Table 1, a
horizontal line separates the actualized content from the given set of codes or subcodes the
reader/viewer applies to these expressions of textual form as Discoursive Structures or
Plastic and Perceptual Variables in order to transform them into meaningful content.

The Reader: Lexical Codes and Subcodes

Basic Lexical Dictionary. The reader utilizes the graphic and lexical signs provided by
the text to construct the most basic semantic sense from semes, or minimal content units,
embodied in the expression(s). This is a primary tentative attempt toward an
amalgamation (in a general sense) from which meaning is created (Greimas, 1983; Eco,
1983). For example, the sentence /Effie is a gregarious ant/ contains composite syntactic
and semantic indicators within the terms of the expression which function to elicit cognitive
and affective responses in the reader. The noun /Effie/ is a deictic referent to a human
name, that of a girl, or perhaps, a woman, which in itself promotes mental associations
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INTENSIONS EXTENSIONS
Lexical Visual Lexical Visual

Elementary Visual Textual

Ideological Ideological World (Visual)
Structures Structures Structures: Veridiction

Assignment: truth Visual corroboration:

values
visual truth matrixes,
Judgement congruity judgements,
Visual 'of (non) contiguity
Actantial
Actantial accessability
Structures
Structures of (cross-medial)
textual worlds

Narrative Visual
Metaphorical
Structures:
Structures:
Themes, Forecasts Visual Indexes:
Themes,
motives, and
motives
visual Inferential Walks Visual Image Indicators
functions
functions
(fabula)
(cross-medial)

Visual
Discoursive (Bracketed) Anaphoric/Deictic
Plastic
Structures: Extensions: Extensions:
and
Perceptual
Semantic First references First references to a
Variables
Disclosures to a possible world possible visual world

Linear Lexical Manifestation

Linear Visual Manifestation

lexical Codes Visual Codes

and and
Subcodes Subcodes

Basic Lexical Dictionary Basic Visual Dictionary

Rules of Co-reference READER Rules of Visual Co-reference
Selections: Contextual and VIEWER Selections: Contextual and
Circumstantial Circumstantial
Overcoding: Rhetorical and Visual Stylistic Overcoding
Stylistic Common Visual Frames
Common Frames Intervisual Frames
Intertextual Frames Ideological Overcoding
Ideological Overcoding

Table l. A method for the semiotic analysis of the picture book.

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representative of the properties of the word manifest in its human state (e.g., a woman as
experienced, in reality, having human proportions and characteristics). The development
of meaning-making is dependent upon the existence of a basic lexical dictionary in the
conscious mind of the reader that can be drawn upon to reference associations stimulated
by visual clues in the form of word arrangements. The syntactical properties (e.g.,
singular, feminine, noun, etc.) of the lexemes, or words, do not completely actualize the
meaning potential of a total expression until connections between other terms in the
expression are established through co-referencing. Thus, the isolation and actualization of
the virtual semantic properties latent within lexemes is contingent upon the syntactic
structuring of expression which facilitates the reader's semantic disclosures.
Rules of Co-reference. The various shifters in the text work to orientate the reader on
the basis of the first semantic analysis of the words (Greimas, 1988). /Effie/ as a sememic
unit is undercut with reference to non-human associations since the noun qualifier /ant/ is
semantically anaphoric in reexpressing and reestablishing a previously made semantic
relationship. Initial reader expectations are also displaced with the realization that /Effie/
refers specifically to a non-human entity and the sememic level of meaning becomes
redefined textually through the syntactic relations between lexemes (e.g., /Effie/^«human»;
/Effie/=«ant»). Co-references are textually based and disambiguate meaning from surface
to deep levels within the structure of the sentence (see Greimas, 1979). If this is not
possible, the reader relies upon further textual clues for clarification.

Contextual and Circumstantial Selection. Beyond the co-textual manifestations of

meaning in the linear text (e.g., word forms), contextualized selections of meaning provide
possibilities for correctly determining the reference of a term in comparison with other
terms originating from the same semiotic system, such as in a language (Eco, 1979). In
this case, reference is based upon an encyclopaedic knowledge framework where one
lexeme can denotatively and connotatively generate a series of associations with which the
reader may or may not be familiar as determined through experience. For example, a
lexeme like /hen/ can refer to «bird» or «poultry» in different cultural contexts and point to
radically diverse associations for each reader depending upon experience(s) of the lexical
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sign as real world object. The distinction is actualized by the reader as possible
interpretations of a word within an expression are selected and rejected according to
textually suggested correlations of lexical signs with external referents which are used to
build interprétants, or mental representations of signs.
Circumstantial selection is based upon "bookish", or intertextual competence, and the
ability to reconcile the presence of elements external or foreign to the semiotic code to
which a particular text adheres. This might include aspects of vocabulary, specialized
expressions or jargon. In narrative texts, circumstantial selections become contextualized,
or are linguistically defined in order to avoid confusion (Eco, 1976; 1979; Iser, 1978).
Rhetorical and Stylistic Overcoding. Rhetorical and/or stylistic cues alert the reader
whether language is being used literally or according to aesthetic convention. For example,
the phrase /Once upon a time/ is an overcoded expression in that the reader is in possession
of and inserts the part of the code required to complete the purpose of communication (Eco,
1979). The reader is aware of and alerted to the fact that a story beginning with this
overcoded expression is fictional and written according to a certain style commensurate
within the genre expected. The interpretation of the textual indicator is not naive but
purposeful in setting up and meeting structural or thematic expectations. To this end,
rhetorical and stylistic overcoding can be used as a literary device in aesthetic texts.
Inferences by Common Frames. Frames are data-structures which are used in lexical
texts to represent stereotypical situations experienced in reality (Winston, 1977). There are
specific elements within frames (courses of events, people, objects, actions, relations, and
facts) outlining basic courses of cognitive action (perception and language
comprehension) that are necessary to understand the situation as an experience (Eco,
1976; 1979). Beyond the visual aspects of a text, which will be discussed later, a
narrative contains references to visual objects, the features of which are isolated and
identified in order to create an overall common frame. For example, the lexical description
of a farm might contain references to objects with visual dimensions (e.g., hen, pond,
haystack, mill, etc.) in order to establish a particular context for the scene depicted
recognizable to the reader as a common frame. The listing of these objects is in itself an
 35

overcoding of the information required to understand the specific situation and the
subsequent building of further data structures to complement the common frame.
Inferences by Intertextual Frames. No text is read independently of the reader's
experience of other texts (Kristeva, 1969). This is another example of overcoding where
the extratextual experiences of the reader act as an encyclopaedic source for information
which can be used to disambiguate a text. What Eco (1979) describes as literary topoi, or
narrative schemes of understanding based upon intertextual frames of reference, may aid
the reader to the extent that a text is immediately invested with properties that are the
products of intertextual reference (see also Iser, 1978; Kristeva, 1969) (e.g., allusions to
stock elements of literary experience such as "the villain", "the Cinderella tale", "the happy
ending", etc.)
Ideological Overcoding. Ideological structures are outlined discoursively within a
lexical text through the progression of a narrative sequence of action. The extent to which
the reader can grasp textual ideological structures is determined by a personal ideological
subcode, or gestalt (Iser, 1978). If a text is open, it allows for interpretation against a
different code and is personalized in being uniquely invested with subjective meaning
(Eco,1976; 1979; 1984). In the case of a closed text, however, a given ideological
background can help to uncover or to inhibit the operation of the text on the level of fabula.
For example, ideological bias can work to switch codes and lead the reader to interpret the
code manifest in the text aberrantly, or other than that intended by the writer. That is not to
say that the reader can know precisely what aspect of the writer's ideological
subcode is incorporated in the text; nevertheless, tentative ideological subcodes can be
attributed to the writer when authorial judgements are isolated, usually in the form of
philosophical statements (Eco, 1979) (e.g., in some instances, texts ask for ideological
sympathy from the reader). For example, in the genre of fable, one may ask: What are the
affects upon the reader of a story of an ant who, once exiled from a society of ants because
of a naturally inherited physical trait, returns to heroically save the day because of that
particular trait and now commands respect and love from those who once despised her? If
the reader perceives the ant as being vindicated in the outcome of the action, then there is a
 36

sympathy between the embodied textual, and implicit authorial, ideology and that of the
reader. If not, then the ideological code of the reader succeeds in promoting an aberrant
decoding of the text because of subjectivity.

The Reader as Viewer: Visual Codes and Subcodes

Basic Visual Dictionary. With reference to the recognition of basic properties of visual
representations, if the form depicted in a visual text is distinctively analogous, or
representational, the viewer is able to juxtapose figuramatic properties present in the form
against the basic properties of natural forms as experienced in reality according to external
visual paradigms . Forms are iconic to the extent that the actual properties possessed by
corresponding real world referents, are reflected in and not possessed by the represented
figures (see Morris, 1946; Eco, 1979). The conventionality of the imitative code of the
visual text is brought to bear upon the expressive plane but the content plane, the meaning,
may also be affected if the analogous image comes to arbitrarily represent something
outside of itself. In such a case, the visual text becomes symbolic, or contains digital
imagery expression and content of which are determined according to internal visual
paradigms of a particular work or intervisualparadigms drawn from the viewer's other
encyclopaedic sources (e.g., the fox as a symbol of «cunning», the color red representing
«danger», etc.).

Rules of Visual Co-reference. After the initial figuramatic analysis resulting in the
detection of visual syntactic properties, the viewer disambiguates spatial, or toposensitive,
relations among the forms in a pictorial plane. The first tentative attempts at visual co-
reference are confirmed by a more detailed scanning of the forms as co-textual items within
the pictorial plane and subsequent judgements are noted mentally. In this way, the visual
text doubly articulates meaning on both the expressive and content planes (Eco, 1976;
1979; Sonesson, 1989).
(Visual) contextual selections and circumstantial selections. These are coded and
displayed through the figure of form. To be considered iconic, the figures represented in a
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text must exhibit properties that are distinguishing characteristics of particular types of form
as determined by external visual paradigms . For example, an animal depicted visually can
be distinguished by its physical characteristics; however, if the illustrator wishes to
distinguish between two or more types of the same animal, then the properties endowed the
animal in the illustration will be precise enough for the viewer to cognitively facilitate the
distinction. It is the responsibility of the viewer to eliminate the possibilities of alternative
selection while drawing from an encyclopaedic source of knowledge.
Conversely, if the figures contained in the text are foreign to the viewer's experience,
then the viewer must resort to some external point of reference for clarification. Quite
often, the text contextualizes explanations of items foreign to the viewer in order to
expediate the meaning making process.
Visual Stylistic Overcoding. The cumulative elements which comprise the visual text
are stylistic features coded within the work itself (e.g., the depiction of figures, choice of
setting, perspective, color choice, variation in textures, etc.) and can not be extricated from
the particular context of expression. These stylistic features act as overcoded cues in the
visual text when the viewer is alerted as to whether a work are being used to meet structural
or thematic expectations according to the purpose of communication. For example, an
abstract treatment of form is a stylistic feature of visual text which in itself sets up a series
of associations, expectations and judgements in the viewer with respect to the means of
accepting, decoding and interpreting the images presented.
Inferences by Common Visual Frames. Utilizing the definition posited earlier (see
Inferences by Common Textual Frames), it is necessary to stress that common visual
frames are not necessarily inchoate texts (see Eco, 1979; 1984; Saint-Martin; 1987). The
features which create the overall common frame are identified and isolated visually to
produce overcoding. For example, a farm scene could depict some of the major elements
that are traditionally associated with rural agricultural life: particular animal types (e.g.,
hen, fox, goat, etc.); naturalistic settings (e.g., trees, crops to be harvested, grassland,
etc.); farm architecture (e.g., barn, hen-house, farm-house, windmill, etc.); agricultural
artifacts (e.g., tractor, cart, etc.). This can be described as a common visual frame because
 38

of the stereotypical nature of the scene contents.

Inferences by Intervisual Frames. It has already been stated that no text is read
independently of the reader's experience of other texts. Where the external visual
experiences of the reader are elicited to act upon a visual text, visual topoi, or visual
schemes of understanding, may aid the reader to the extent that the work is immediately
invested or overcoded with properties that are the products of intervisual frames of
reference. The viewer must supply the necessary intervisual knowledge to make meaning
from the visual text in this case (e.g., stylization of forms according to convention,
symbolic shapes, other culturally relevant information, etc.).
Visual Ideological Overcoding. In a visual text, the interaction between the forms
depicted, both open and closed (see Arnheim, 1974), produces visual contexts consisting
of formally structured pictorial elements which function on the thematic level to develop a
distinct visual code objectifiable through recourse to language. The ideological
interpretation of a visual text is dependent to a great degree upon the viewer's powers of
visual perception because internal variables (e.g., the ability to perceive color, depth,
topological disjunctions, etc.) may influence the interpretive outcome regardless of the
openness or closedness of the text itself.

Actualized Content: Lexical Intensions and Extensions

Discoursive Structures

The responses to the word level of a text must be actualized by the reader to allow
further amalgamations. Meaning is created through semantic disclosures made by the
reader relative to discoursive structures which isolate the manifested semantic properties of
the lexemes that are virtually present in the reader's store of culturally based information
(Eco, 1979; Greimas, 1988). Therefore, the words in a lexical text actualize no meaning
without the reader. The topic, or theme, of the lexical text functions as a guiding force to
 39

insure communication and to delimit the extent of possible semantic properties within the
lexemes to be actualized by making them textually relative. The isotopies, or actual textual
verifications of the topic, present in an expression also direct the meaning making process
by providing a single level of sense from which the reader guides amalgamations (Greimas,
1983).

(Bracketed) Extensions

Once the discoursive structures of the text are actualized, the reader is certain of the
characters, the actions and the events that comprise the plot, since, the intensional semantic
disclosures performed by the reader are realized through the interplay of lexical structures
in relation to and within a total narrative sequence. Suspension of disbelief is then
facilitated by the first overt recognition of a possible world with an inherent underlying
logic corresponding to that of the characters, the actions and the events in the plot (Hodge,
1990; Eco, 1979).

Narrative Structures

Whereas the plot is the basic action of the text, the basic elements from which the story
is generated is the fabula: the make up of the characters, the inherent logic of the action(s)
and the time-line action of events (Greimas, 1987; Eco, 1979). Realization of the fabula
involves a continuous series of abductions, or inferences, experienced linearly by the
reader in the process of disambiguating a narrative text (see Peirce, 1931; Eco, 1979).
Ultimately, the reading process leads from micropropositions emanating from expectations
initiated through semantic disclosures on the level of discoursive structures to more
definitive macropropositions such as themes, motifs, narrative functions and the
determination of various levels of abstraction regarding the fabula upon which the story
itself generates meaning for any given action in the text (Eco, 1979; Greimas, 1983; 1988).
 40

Forecasts and Inferential Walks

Since the fabula is always experienced as a linear and sequential set of abductions, a
disjointing effect is necessarily experienced by the reader, thereby marring the vicarious
imaginative experience to some extent. A n extension of the imagination to presuppose
further action results in aporia, or concerned curiosity, at the major or relevant disjunctions
of the fabula which are set at the level of plot. Here, the reader infers by gathering
intertextual support for the hypotheses created through the discursive structures of the text.
In this way, the expected and/or the unexpected is made explicit "as individuals and
properties belonging to different possible worlds imagined by the reader as possible
outcomes of the fabula" (Eco, 1979, p.218)

Actantial Structures

The lexical text, as narrative, works to verify reader forecasts with respect to the fabula
(Eco, 1978; Greimas, 1983). Narrative is segmented into programs, or stories where the
fabula and every other narrative structure can be further abstracted and reduced to formal
positions which produce actantial roles (e.g., subject vs. object, sender vs. receiver)
according to the modal predication of lexical actants, those acting and those acted upon, that
function thematically on the level of discourse to produce actors, or characters (Greimas,
1970). The active interaction between the lexical actants within expressions on the level of
discoursive structures creates thematic meaning as the fabula is unfolded through the
interplay of actors in the narrative structures. Lexical actants take the roles of actors when
the thematic functions of a text are reinforced as discoursive and narrative structures, thus,
reliably pointing to meaning within a text.

Elementary Ideological Structures

In comparing and contrasting actantial and actorial structures manifest in the lexical text
 41

so as to distinguish "textual truth", there is an acknowledgement of the verisimilitude of the

fabula on the part of the reader. This implies a comparison of the textual world with the
reader's own world vision and a suppression of further suspension of disbelief (Eco,
1979). Elementary ideological structure oppositions can be translated into truth
assignments where the reader, utilizing already formulated schemata, makes ideologically
motivated interpretive decisions about the ideology expressed in a given text.

Textual World Structures

Once "textual truth" has been accepted, the text is reduced to binary oppositions and
there is a subsequent assignment of truth values between the textual world structures
determined. The given relations between the lexemes at the actantial level are considered
insofar as they are predicated in the textual world structures as true or false (Eco, 1976;
1979). Ultimately, the reader makes final decisions about the credibility of the text as a
series of reported events, the sincerity in embodiment of ideological beliefs through
convincing characters and the accessibility of the textual world as a fictional experience.

Visual Intensions and Extensions

Plastic and Perceptual Variables

Just as the lexical text is constituted of the sum of individual features which work to
create meaning as a whole, the visual text is comprised of readily identifiable elements that
create a meaningful integrated form of expression. Consequently, the relationships
between the manifest properties of coloremes, or minimal color units comprising a visual
text, disclosed at a point of ocular centration during the act of viewing, may also be
analyzed syntactically and semantically (Saint-Martin, 1987; Arnheim, 1974). The
cumulative effect of two sets of visual variables, plastic and perceptual, upon the
perception process, isolates the latent properties of the coloremes virtually present in the
 42

viewer's store of culturally determined visual encyclopaedic knowledge (Gombrich, 1960;

Saint-Martin, 1987). Exploring the general chromatic relations between coloremes in a
particular pictorial text, creates an awareness of how the visual variables determined
through the formal structure of the work interact with respect to the perceptual processes of
the viewer and engender meaningful visual experiences. Color, value and texture are
plastic variables while line, shape, form, vectoriality (focal point and directional tension)
and implantation (position/balance) are perceptual variables (Saint-Martin, 1987).

Visual Anaphoric/Deictic Extensions

Anaphora, for language, is characterized as a network of a relations between two or

more terms, on a syntagmatic axis, establishing linkages in discourse (Greimas, 1983). On
the level of visual text, anaphora can be regarded as the unity and coherence between the
elements which comprise the work that must be maintained to create pictorial sense. The
recognition of form, from schema as objects, in a visual text is deictic because it is
dependent upon the recognition of changes in the intensification or regrouping of coloremes
aggregately within a visual field. Distinct contours between figures (open or closed)
creates analogous forms isomorphic with reality and results in a stable and organized
visual field; whereas, digital, or symbolic, forms rival viewer interpretation because
distinct form contours may or may not be present within the figures. The spatialization, or
placement of forms, within the fore, middle or background of a pictorial plane is a
determinate of the viewer's interpretation of a visual text resulting from variables in
perception(s) according to individual gestalten approximations derived from experience (see
Arnheim, 1974; Saint-Martin, 1987). Ultimately, the viewer can discern visual forms in a
definitive spatial relations and the setting of which they are a part, thereby, setting up a
possible visual world that invites the suspension of disbelief.
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Visual Metaphorical Structures

It is primarily through closed forms that regions or subregions in a pictorial plane lend
themselves to iconization and are interpreted in relation to the properties manifest in relative
natural forms external to the world of the visual text (Eco, 1979; Saint-Martin, 1987). It is
on the level of visual metaphorical structures that a verbalized equivalent can also be
connected to the representation of form, thus, allowing for the linguistic differentiation of
the pictorial elements of the text which adhere to vraisemblance, or display a direct
correspondence with real world entities. In "global" terms, the extent to which the visual
text reinforces the lexical text can be described as cross-medial agreement. If there is a
direct correlation between the visual and lexical possible worlds projected, then an objective
correlative, or concrete visual representation, of the possible world referred to on a
total textual level is established and elaborated upon through linear visual narrative . If not,
then there is a chiasmos, or separation, between alternative world visions posited, visual
and lexical, that the reader must juxtapose as fabulaic alternatives. The products of this
type of visual stylistic overcoding are literal and figurative visual frames which may or may
not reinforce reader abductions irrespective of stylistic considerations. On this level, the
visual text works to secure thematic considerations as well as the functions of visual
metaphorical structures from which abstractions in the from of macropropositions of the
visual fabula (e.g., themes, pictorial motifs, etc.) are abduced by the viewer.

Visual Indexes

Visual indexes are the result of generative or repressive cross-medial image indicators
built into the conventions of the text as a supportive visual framework for the inferences
drawn from the lexical text. Beyond replication of possible lexical world constructs, the
visual indexes set up cross-medial frames of reference with respect to internal and external
paradigms applicable to a particular text which suppress disjunction and support thematic
concerns on the level of the "global" fabula by providing points for comparison/contrast
 44

and clarification/elaboration upon the narrative structures of the lexical text through the
linear visual narrative of the pictorial text. Therefore, the visual indexes serve to limit and
define the viewer/reader's extensional responses in accord with the aesthetic conventions of
the text by aligning the visual contexts appropriately to insure indexicality for the
interpretation of signs and codes, lexical and visual, within a specific schematic and textual
framework.

Visual Actantial Structures

Through the isolation of visual actantial structures, the viewer attempts to furnish
hypotheses necessary for an analytical approach to the pictorial text as part of a sequential
linear visual narrative. The viewer's approach to decoding, however, is non-linear but
correlational in that the interaction of forms within the pictorial setting results in an
awareness of the visual actants comprising a supersyntagm, or combination of elements co-
present in the visual text, as they function to elicit thematic meaning (Saint-Martin, 1987)
over an extended series of visual frames which constitute the visual fabula. The active or
passive interaction of forms creates visual actantial roles (e.g., subject vs. object, sender
vs. receiver) within the picture plane and as the visual plot is unfolded pictorially through
the interplay of visual actants with distinctive thematic functions in the action and events of
the linear visual narrative, the viewer is able to discern the visual actors .

Visual Ideological Structures

In essence, "textual truth" is determined pictorially when the visual text is

acknowledged as 'real' and the subsequent assignment of truth values placed upon a
particular form or relation(s) between forms, as visual actors depicted in a linear visual
narrative, is correlated with the truth values disseminated by the same relations between
relative actors in the narrative structures of its lexical compliment. The reduction of the
visual text to propositions of binary opposition determines if there is an incongruency
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which must be resigned before the lexical and visual texts are aligned on the level of fabula
to consolidate the total ideological vision of the text.

(Visual) Veridiction

Through (visual) veridiction, there is an attempt at corroboration of assigned truths,

both lexical and visual, within a single textual world structure. The extent to which the
'textual truth' assignments of the lexical text and visual text are aligned thematically on the
level of fabula, determines the aesthetic success of the work as a whole and the viability of
the vision embodied within it.

Summary

The method outlined in Chapter Three is the culmination of inquiry into the
epistemological, theoretical and methodological presuppositions of semiotics (as derived
from the discussion in Chapter Two) (see Eco, 1976; 1979; Greimas, 1983; Saint-Martin,
1987) relevant to the research problem: How does the textual form of the picture book
work, both lexically and visually, as a system of signs and codes to create meaning? In
itself, the method directly addresses the purpose(s) of the study (stated in Chapter One) by
identifying, defining and explaining through the metatextual 'boxes' in Table 1 the
signifying elements constituting the bifurcated nature of form in the picture book as well as
the interaction between lexical and visual text in relation to the reader/viewer's intensional
and extensional acts of meaning-making and interpretation.
 46

CHAPTER FOUR

T H E SEMIOTICS O F T H E L E X I C A L T E X T

Overview

Chapter Four illustrates the specific applications of the method outlined in Chapter
Three in a formal semiotic analysis of the signs and codes comprising the lexical text of the
picture book Effie (Allison & Reid, 1990). Reference is made to how the reader
constructs intensional and extensional meaning from the lexical component of a picture
book in the form of cognitive, affective and aesthetic responses and to the type(s) and
extent of semiotic interaction between the lexical and visual signs and codes which
engender the genre's textual form. The pragmatic aspects of communication (Peirce, 1931)
between the reader/viewer and the text are considered in Chapter Four (and later in Chapter
Five) insofar as is relevant to the discussion.

Intensional Semiotics: Discoursive Structures to Semantic Disclosures

The graphic clues to meaning provided by the lexical text of a picture book are signs or
cues enabling the reader's progression toward the construction of fundamental semantic
sense from semes, or minimal content units, embodied in the expressions. On the
lexematic level of the text manifesting codes and subcodes in discoursive structures, the
reader must resort to a basic lexical dictionary, present in the conscious mind, as
determined through culture and experience to actualize intensional responses. The
meaning-making potential of the text on the lexematic level is also dependent upon the
reader's encyclopaedic knowledge which can be accessed through the basic lexical
dictionary of associations mentally stimulated by lexical cues. The sentence /Effie came
 47

from a long long line of ants/ (Allison & Reid, 1990, p. I) contains composite syntactic
2

and semantic indicators within the terms of the expression which elicit the intensional
cognitive and affective responses required of the reader to decode the discoursive structures
of the lexical text. The lexeme /Effie/ is a proper noun referential to a human name of the
female sex, perhaps a girl or a woman, and in itself exudes semantic associations
representative of the properties of its human referent imbued within the lexematic form of
expression (e.g., «a woman experienced in the real world as having human proportions
and dimensions»).

The syntactic properties of the lexemes (singular, feminine, noun, etc.) are not
completely actualized in terms of meaning potential until the remaining connections with the
other lexemes in a sentence are established through co-referencing. /Effie/, as a nominal
lexematic form, is unusual because it is used rarely; therefore, an immediate reaction to the
lexeme at the semantic level may necessarily be delayed until more information is
dearchived from the reader's encyclopaedic knowledge of onomastic terms through
abductions drawn from the syntactically determined co-references of remaining terms in the
expression. Consequently, the first semantic analysis performed by the reader of the
lexeme /Effie/ as a sememic unit, presenting a defining set of terms, is undercut with
reference to non-human associations which are blown up rather than narcotized within the
linear manifestation of the lexical text. The lexeme /ant/ qualifies the nominal noun and is
anaphoric in reexpressing and reestablishing a previously made semantic relationship. The
reader's expectations are then displaced with the realization that the lexeme /Effie/ refers not
to a human form but a zoomorphic subject and the sememic level of meaning becomes
redefined textually through semantic disclosures based upon syntactic associations between
the lexemes: «Effie is not a human female entity but an ant». The lack of disjunction
separating /Effie/ and /ant/ on the "deep" level points reliably to non-contrastive relations
between the two lexemes and reveals a semantic resemblance, or conjunction, based upon
the semic category of species. Consequently, the operative semic categories that form the
fundamental semantics of the "deep" level contain the semantic categories that form the
 48

elementary structures of signification and the relations and transformations which derive
and constitute those structures, or fundamental syntax (Greimas, 1983). The semantic and
syntactic component of the expressions define spatialization, temporalization and
actorialization in terms of the narrative structures once the subject is disambiguated on the
level of discoursive structures.

non-ant non-human

Figure 6. The deep level of /Effie/.

In considering how the internal spatialization of setting is established on the lexematic level
through the discoursive structures, it is necessary to examine how the syntactic and
semantic conditions in the text lead to the actualization of the actor, or character, Effie
within a particular context of actions and events in relation to other forms of conscious
being referred to in the lexical plot which cumulatively engender a possible textual world.
One aspect is the particular combination of the lexemes /Effie/, /long/, /line/ and /ants/ in a
specific syntactic order which compels the reader to produce a series of co-references that
 49

create a spatially ordered sense of "a world" as determined by the linguistic functions of
terms (see Greimas, 1983). For example, the toponym /line/ modifies and is qualified by
the repeated use of the adjective /long/ to create the following semic disjunction:

/long/ v s expanse
line non-line

Figure 7. A semic conjunction and disjunction based on spatialization.

The semic category length applied to /line/ enables the contrast in the expression between
the form of ant being represented in the lexeme /Effie/, without a spatial context, to the
form of ant being spatially delineated and referenced in the phrase /hundreds of others/ of
the following sentence, by defining the relations of the subject to the collective form of
being alluded to through the discoursive structures in terms of somatic lineage and
formation, which are also spatial constructs of determination. Therefore, the
figurativization allows for the specific point of conjunction and disjunction, resemblance
or non-resemblance, dividing the lexical actants into subject vs. object, sender vs. receiver
as individual actors in the narrative structures to be determined textually. Spatialization
leads to actorialization through the individuation of being and the creation of actantial and
thematic roles. The separation and segmentation of subjects on the actantial level creates a
disjunction between the two discursive subject sets, /Effie/ (SI) and /the others/ (S2), and
results in the actorialization of the lexical actants, which through the reader's initial
semantic disclosures promoted by the discoursive structures in the lexical text, have
previously been figurativized and identified as characters invested with zoomorphic traits
and properties. The reader's affective responses to the characters can then be said to result
in relation to the process of figuritivization.

Semic iterativity within a syntagmatic chain, such as a phrase or sentence (Eco, 1984)
establishes isotopy, or the coherence and homogeneity of text through textual verifications
of the topic, or theme, which allows for the chain-linking of utterances in the progression
 50

from discoursive structures to narrative structures. The discoursive structures of the first
four pages of Effie adhere strictly to the actorialization of the lexical actants by facilitating
the basic syntactic organization of expressions necessary for thematic roles to be defined
through the isolation oiactorial isotopies in terms of subject vs. object, sender vs. receiver
on the level of narrative: «Effie is an ant, with a history, who differentiates from other ants
by possessing a thunderous voice from which the other ants wish to escape». From a
linguistic point of view, the coherence of the text is ensured because the actor /Effie/ is
figurativized and rendered permanent in the lexical narrative as the main subject around
which all relations with other individual or collective actors are structured. The narrative
structure of the lexical text can then be said to unfold through the manifestations of the
subjects in different actantial positions within sentences while resulting in transformations
of values which simultaneously institute, determine and qualify disjunctions between two
or more discoursive subjects according to thematic roles (Greimas, 1970).

individual actor collective actors

vs.
/Effie/ (SI) /others/ (S2)

Figure 8. Textual actors in a relation of disjunction.

It is obvious, however, that the discoursive topic governing the sequencing of the total
narrative is always /Effie/, or more precisely, /Effie's voice/ and the resulting series of
negative reactions to it are manifest in the actions and events of the plot acted out by the
lexical actors on the level of narrative structures which is divisible into programs according
to the actantial and thematic roles of the subject(s).
Temporalization in the introductory narrative sequence (NSI) of Effie attempts to
establish verisimilitude of the characters, the actions and the events comprising the lexical
plot through the citing of an "historical'' point of reference, within the possible lexical
world of the picture book, for the existence of an endomic creature named Effie. The
narrative time frame is suggested in the use of the past tense verb /came/, in the expression
 51

/Effie came from a long long line of ants/, to establish an in médias res, or interrupted
temporal sequence of actions from past to present, where the action is delineated to have
been predicated before the beginning of the present narrative at an undisclosed past time.
The reader is placed in the middle of the action, with the implication here being that the
forward progression of time begins from the point of first narrative utterance; hence, the
creation of a viable fictional reality is based on the logic of an allusion to an historical past
of the subject as verified in the temporal progression of the linear narrative. The illusion of
verisimilitude, in this instance, leading to an initial suspension of the reader's disbelief.

/came/ vs. «will continue to come»

(prior to narrative utterance) (post narrative sequence)

Figure 9. Temporalization of the possible world.

The first sequence of the total narrative (pp. 1-4) is set up by a distinct temporal
disjunction, between itself and the rest of the lexical text, through which the discoursive
dominance of the actors /Effie/ and the /other ants/ is presented. The subsequent
suggestion of a time frame as having elapsed at a specific, yet undefined, point in the past
is indicated in the lexical text as /one day/ and the change of narrative sequence which
allows for the altering of actantial roles and the substitution of dominant subjects (or
objects) in the narrative structures is established. It is then possible for the lexical text to
present the actorial motives which are necessary for the logic of the characters, the actions
and the events within the lexical plot and for the creation of actantial and thematic roles.
The discoursive strategies embodied within the text itself are validated through the
inferences made by the reader at the level of narrative structures. From a semantic
perspective, co-referencing is not established grammatically but narratologically as the
blowing up and narcotizing of various properties of the lexemes occurs by means of an
overall generative trajectory of linear and dynamic discourse progression. It is then
possible, if required by the reader, to determine what function a particular word performs
 52

in the total narrative. For example, the first narrative sequence works toward the figurative
use of language in a simile which represents lexically the dysphoric, or negative
connotations, resulting from the juxtaposition of the lexemes /voice/ and /thunder/ as binary
opposites in terms of level of sound volume. The emotive power of the connotations
associated with the mental concepts represented in the lexeme /thunder/ are relayed back to
the mental concepts represented in the lexeme /voice/ relative to the subjects /Effie/ and /the
other ants/ and this results in the separation of discoursive subjects dominating the narrative
sequence at two polar axes according to the semic category of sound volume in terms of
the isotopy /voice/.

/Effie/ /ants/

Negative SI VOICE S2 Positive

/thunder/ /tiny/

Figure 10. The figurativization of actors according to the textual topic.

Accordingly, there is a natural disjunction set up lexematically on the level of narrative

structures between the two discoursive subjects based upon the extent (or lack of)
proclivity for the production of sound, defined as /voice/, in each lexical actor portrayed
within the sequence. This is clearly defined to be the topic of the discoursive structures in
the introductory narrative sequence. A first structural consequence derived from the
description of Effie's voice as /thunder/ is to give the subjects a specific narrative trajectory
and define the thematic roles (SI and S2) and modal predication of subjects in actantial
structures by which the narrative is segmented into programs. A second result is to
recognize the dimensions of semantic meaning evoked through the figurative manifestations
of rhetorical language use in the expression /voice like thunder/. In this way, a denotation
becomes a connotation linking the reader's cognitive and affective associational responses
with one particular lexeme in modification of the subjects according to the polar axes of the
 53

semic category in question. Since there is no literal level of explanation that can
disambiguate the expression adequately in real world terms without the reader's full
participation in acknowledging the special use of lexical terms for aesthetic affect(s) (see
Eco, 1984), the relations between the concepts are meaningful insofar as they allow for the
differentiation of terms from which meaning can be made and not the extent to which the
terms share resemblance.

SI S2
/thunder/ vs. /tiny ant voices/
«non-tiny ant voices» «non-thunder»

Figure i l . The thematization of the actors in terms of the textual topic.

Extensional Responses: From Paradigms to Possible Worlds

In order to determine how a reader/viewer responds aesthetically to a lexical or visual

artistic work, it is necessary to examine how the rational intellect influences affective
choices regarding the acceptability of a possible world vision depicted in a text according to
cognitive and affective modes of understanding established through experience. We, as
readers, bring to the text an encyclopaedic knowledge, developed in relation to culture
through our real world and literary experiences, ready-made frames of reference in the form
of extratextual paradigms and intertextual paradigms respectively (see Kristeva, 1969).
These externally derived paradigms are automatically juxtaposed by the reader against the
internal paradigms of the possible worlds depicted in an artistic text which embody an
internally self-consistent logic of characters, actions and events, the particularized features
of which, may well have no validity for, or application in, the extratextual world. Even
though it may be somewhat speculative to generalize the extent to which paradigms are
truly shared experiences without acknowledgement of the variables present in human nature
 54

resulting from differences between individuals, the shared experiences of language and
culture are a homogenizing effect which stabilizes what is the "norm" or "mean" expected
from participants in a particular society. Consequently, it can be concluded that the
members of a given culture share more common similarities than common differences in
behavior and thought (Eco, 1976; 1984; Lotman, 1990).
In the case of Effie, the total text, both lexical and visual, works toward the suspension
of disbelief by narcotizing any ideological disjunctions which may be created between
extratextual paradigms derived from the reader/viewer's encyclopaedic knowledge and the
internal paradigms of the possible world portrayed in the picture book that would impinge
upon and mar the vicarious aesthetic experiences promulgated by the artistic text. From the
first narrative utterance, the reader is alerted to the fact that the story is fictional and not
realistic, since, ants do not possess the human faculty of speech and it is extremely
doubtful that in the history of the world there has ever existed an ant named Effie with
anthropomorphic features of the kind objectified in the visual text. However, there are also
the unique stylistic implications arising from the anthropomorphization of zoomorphic
beings in both the lexical and visual texts which suppress the textual function of isolating
the fictive elements of the story. Indeed, aspects of the possible world of Effie are set up in
the lexical text which are in themselves believable as common frames of reference and
reinforce the logic of the actions of the characters and the events related in the narrative
structures to promote the reader's acceptance of the lexical fabula on its own terms. The
lexical actants which develop figurativized actors, in themselves, all refer externally to
familiar zoomorphic forms and are actualized as such through the particular actions and
behaviors of the creatures described in the text that are synchronous with what is known to
be expected from them through experience. These specific expressions of predication are
chosen in relation to these acting subjects in order to justify figuritivization according to
external paradigms. For example, a real world /caterpillar/ does in fact /wriggle/ as a means
for locomotion and /split his skin/ in the natural metamorphosis to butterfly; a /butterfly/ is
capable of being /blown away/ from the force of air pressure after /landing/ on a flower; a
spider does, in a sense, /parachute/ to safety and a beetle does, in fact, hide all appendages
 55

while /spinning/ topsy-turvy. The aesthetic function of the lexical text is to establish a
realistic point of reference for the physical behavior of the subjects, as reinforced by
predicates derived from extratextual paradigms in order to to legitimize intellectually, for the
reader, the fictional portrayal of the zoomorphic forms by actualizing a possible textual
world which corresponds to external reality in degree. A reader/viewer is, therefore, more
likely to accept the non-realistic visual representation of a napkin-bibbed spider, with an
expression of delight, holding a salt shaker in expectation of a potential victim who will
make a tasty treat, if the lexical text does not contradict, but remains neutral to or supports,
the aesthetic purpose of the code being developed in the possible visual world.
Consequently, the obvious lack of specification in the lexical text about the pictorial forms
depicted (e.g., few adjectives) allows for the support of the aesthetic function of the text by
visual elements which act as stylistic indicators and compliment the purpose of
communication by providing an overfurnished set of possible world structures. Whereby,
the reader/viewer is forced to reassess the content of the message conveyed in the lexical
text in order to comprehend the coding processes through which the lexical expressions and
the visual expressions are structured textually.

The aesthetic sign-functions in the lexical and visual texts of the picture book are based
upon the reader/viewer realizing a process of code altering where the communication act
elicits highly original responses (Eco, 1976). For example, the new and surprising
portrayal of the spider (as discussed previously) in the visual text alters our perception of
the 'world of spiders' by allowing the one to emote upon the concept through connotations
which are built upon the normal sign-function elicited in the lexical and pictorial
representation of «spider» and results in either positive or negative feelings which produce
a response in the reader/viewer based upon the deviation from the "norm" —either
definitional or stylistic. From this point of view, the total text of Effie, as expression and
content, becomes unpredictable and semantically ambiguous because multiple
interpretations of the visual and lexical texts can abound which brings into play different
codes that upset the reader/viewer's already acquired knowledge structures, or schemata,
and cognitive and affective modes of understanding developed in relation to experience.
 56

Eco (1979) explains,

The contextual interaction brings to life more and more meanings and, as soon as
they come to light, they seem fraught with yet other possible semantic choices. .
.The addressee 'senses' the surplus of both expression and content, along with
their correlating rule. This rule must exist, but to recognize it requires a complex
process of abduction, hypotheses, confrontations, rejected and accepted
correlations, judgements of appurtenance and extraneity (pp. 270-273)

For example, intertextual frames of reference may provide the reader with the necessary
background information to comprehend how the duality of meaning is structured
figuratively in the first narrative utterance where the lexeme /line/ plays upon two distinct
denotations each of which implies an altered perception of the lexical plot and influences the
consequent mental construction and construing of the possible world on the level of lexical
fabula. For the reader attempting to define the term /line/ within a definite semantic field
which would allow for trouble-free decoding of the lexeme, it becomes necessary to
examine why (and by extension how) the text is intentionally ambiguous in specifying the
correlating rule between the expression and the content. The sentence /Effie came from a
long long line of ants/ plays punningly upon the reader's ability to contextualize selections
from an encyclopaedic knowledge framework in order to determine the definitive meaning
of the lexeme /line/ as qualified by the epithet /long/. The semantic possibilities for the
denotation of meaning in lexical terms, normally actualized and reinforced textually as
sememes, are not readily isolated through the discoursive structures of the picture book in
this instance because the visual text works to support one denotation (Dl) while not totally
suppressing another denotation (D2) suggested by the lexical text (and vice versa).
 57

D l : /line/ = common ant formation

vs.
D2: /line/ = lineage; ancestral descent

Figure 12. Possible denotations of /line/ actualized by the reader.

The hybrid use of visual and lexical sub-codes to convey semantic sense by guiding
reader/viewer disclosures, in fact, promotes the textual ambiguity which causes the
humorous tone of the sentence as a result of the conflict of contrasting definitive isotopies
presented in the visual and the lexical texts that generate tension between the two sub-codes
and the potential for an aberrant decoding of the lexemes. The meaning of the lexeme /line/
then becomes equivocal because the visual text amplifies and objectifies the virtual
properties of what one may perceive to be associated with an «ant line», while the lexical
text is left open to sememic substitutions that are at odds with the pictorial portrayal (see
Eco, 1976; Greimas, 1979). This is an example of stylistic/rhetorical overcoding, or a type
of aesthetic ideolect, where the expression alerts the reader to the certain conventional use
of language—doing things with words—and the reader must insert the part of the code
required to complete the aesthetic purpose of communication (Eco, 1976). It is at this point
that the reader may make abductions and predictions as to the unfolding of the lexical or
visual fabuli.

Cognitive and Occurential States: Doing and the Subject

The micropropositions actualized through the reader's initial semantic disclosures

enable the progressive abstraction leading to macropropositions of the lexical fabula, from
the lexical plot, in the form of first references to a possible world. In order for the reader to
move beyond the level of semantic disclosures, however, there are two types of doing
consummated by the subjects in a tract of narrative discourse which must be considered:
 58

occurential, or pragmatic, doing (which is a physical form of action) and cognitive, or

psychic, doing (whose object is the attainment of knowledge) (Greimas, 1983). Greimas
(cited from Blonsky, 1985) explains the nature of the cognitive subject in relation to doing
and narrative structure,

Cognitive doing is true doing [sicl it has a subject and that subject aims at an object.
In that way we can write that as an entire narrative programme. However, if you
take cognitive doing, the subject intends an object but that object is, as we said,
knowing; it involves knowing what? Another object, and especially what I call the
doing of someone with someone else. (p. 345)

The textual predication of the cognitive subjects in the form of lexical actants is set up as
interpretive doing and takes the form of verbalized (dialogic) and non-verbalized
(occurential) doings (see Greimas, 1970; Bakhtin, 1981). The process of cognitive doing
can be further broken down in modality to states of active and passive transmission and
reception (Greimas, 1983). The different cognitive operations performed during these
psychic states are indicative of the modes of conscious behavior exhibited by the actantial
subjects as actors. Two questions now arise: 1) A s the possible subject of an occurential
verb or as a subject of its own cognitive doing, what does the presence of bidimensional
levels of a subject's doing within the lexical text indicate?; and 2) What establishes the
conjunctions and disjunctions between the various actants in the lexical text on the basis of
doing?

The act of communication is a conscious attempt at the transmission of knowledge from

internally motivated sources and the reception of knowledge which in turn stimulates its
interpretation. In the picture book Effie, cognitive doing as the transmission of knowledge
is a dynamic and self-directed process performed by the active subject on both the
pragmatic, or plot-line level of occurrences, and cognitive, or knowledge seeking, axes.
For example, the sentence /Effie set out to find someone who would listen to her/ (p.5)
displays the pragmatic as well as the cognitive dimensions of active doing initiated by the
subject in relation to the object with a definite will, purpose and desire. When the
 59

protagonist attempts to communicate with other zoomorphic forms in the possible world of
the lexical text, the main object of the pragmatic action is to acquire cognitive knowledge
about the doings of those deemed potential interlocutors. The modality of transmission is
determined from the subject in relation to the object and results in the predication of doing
where there is a wanting-to-do without knowing-how-to-do which leads to
disappointment because the cognitive reception of the knowledge by the objects (or other
cognitive subjects) of the communication act in the actantial role of receiving the
transmission of a message from the sender, is most typically interpreted negatively as
/noise/ in the narrative sequences constituting the first narrative program (NP1). The
reader's resulting awareness of the functions of the subjects as actants in the narrative
structures (e.g., active subject vs. passive object) leads to macropropositions regarding the
total elements of the story engendered within the lexical text. A third type of cognitive
doing, exhibited in a later narrative sequence (refer to NSVIII), can be categorized as the
already interpreted reception of communicated information. It is represented textually in
Effie by the active avoidance, or escape, of any cognitive doing, either the communication
of, or the reception of, knowledge on the part of the other cognitive subjects with respect to
the protagonist.

Figure 13. A representation of the levels of a subject's doing.

 60

Lexical Actants and the Modality of Discourse

In essence, the point of convergence and investment of both the syntactic and semantic
components on the levels of discoursive semantics and narrative syntax creates actors from
actantial subjects with at least one thematic role and one actantial role through which the
cognitive and occurential doings as a series of actorial transformations are worked out
temporally in the plot. The segmenting of narrative sequences according to temporality
disjunctions makes possible the analysis of the lexical text in which the principle actantial
roles of the subjects are defined and interdefined in the concatenation of utterances that
form syntagms within distinct narrative programs belonging to a larger narrative trajectory
(see Greimas, 1988; Hjelmslev, 1943; Eco, 1979). The syntactic role of a subject in a
narrative sequence is not stationary but in a constant state of flux with respect to its
occurential and cognitive doing at a given time frame in the narrative program. It is the
seeking of new positions to occupy in the paradigmatic organization of the discourse as
syntagms which compose the narrative structures forming the elementary level of surface
narrative syntax that enables the subject to accomplish its function in the total narrative
trajectory. The thematic objectives and goals which constitute the functions entailed by the
subject with regard to the total narrative schema are then actualized textually on the level of
thematic content.

There are thirteen narrative sequences (NSI-NSXIII) in Effie documenting the

transformation of the protagonist from villain-exile to heroine and the subsequent
transformations of the other subjects in terms of cognitive and occurential doing (see
Appendix D). Greimas (cited from Blonsky, 1985) explains the progressive functions of
subject-actant transformations in narrative discourse,

The hero becomes a hero only at a given moment in the narrative route; earlier he
was not a hero, and perhaps at a given moment he will cease to be a hero . . . A
journey often characterized by acquisition of competences . . . Thus we can call a
hero a competent subject who has the will to do and power to do. That is a hero. If
there were no will to do, there would be no hero, but what if one can will but not be
able to do? (p. 347)
 61

Consequently, the dynamic nature of the hero is determined by the "lack" or "absence of
lack" (see Propp, 1928; Greimas, 1970) of the subject, as actor, at a given time with
respect to other subjects also predicated in a particular narrative route. Explained
grammatically, the modifications of the predicate are incurred by the syntactic position of
the lexical subject at various points in the narrative route and reveal the modality, or
syntactic organization of discoursive structures, where the subject acting upon a
corresponding object modifies its predication and defines the actantial roles of both lexemes
as subject vs. object, sender vs. receiver thus resulting in the creation of thematic roles for
each of the lexical actants according to the terms of relation. The sentence /Whenever she
spoke, the whole nest of ants ran to get away from the noise/ (p. 4) contains a definite
modality manifest expressedly in the discoursive structures within a hypotactic structure
specifying "the hierarchical relation linking the two terms situated at two different stages of
derivation (e.g., the relation between main and subordinate clauses, between modified and
modifier, etc.)" (Greimas & Courtes, 1979, p. 145) in terms of the subject's doing versus
being. Referring to the protagonist, the lexical subject /she/ takes on an actantial role of
sender in relation to the expression /the whole nest of ants/ which embodies the receiver of
the message in the object /ants/ within the planes of cognitive and occurential doing. On the
one hand, the subject/sender /she/ (SI) wishes to establish cognitive and occurential lines
of communication with the collective subject /ants/ (S2) who, manifest in the discoursive
structure of the sentence as object/receiver, wish to avoid the cognitive and occurential
reception of the message because of previously interpreted knowledge about the means of
transmission (e.g., Effie speaking = /noise/ = «discomfort»). The cognitive competence of
the subject that presupposes performative doing, being-able-to-do and knowing-how-to-
do, in the context of the relationship between the sender and the receiver of the message in
any act of communication is absent here.

There are two reasons which explain why Effie is incompetent in the act of
communication: 1) because of the loud voice she possess; and 2) because she is naive to
the fact that her voice is unbearably loud for the other animals. Consequently, the cognitive
and occurential communicative objective of the subject/sender can not be fulfilled in this
 62

instance with respect to the object/receiver. The lexical actants can, therefore, be examined
in terms of conformity and non-conformity to the deixes in question (e.g., voice and sound
volume), as represented by the semiotic square, and their disjunction can be determined
upon a paradigmatic axis as "elements that can occupy the same place in the syntagmatic
string, or, in other words, a set of elements each of which is substituted for the other in the
same context" (Greimas & Courtes, 1979, p. 224) (see Appendix C). If we consider
which other lexemes in the course of the narrative program may be substituted for the
particular lexical actants in this sentence and maintain the same semantic sense as well as
the paradigmatic disjunctions established through the syntax of the discoursive structures,
then the issue begins to take on contextual implications as there must be an equivalence of
thematic roles between the different lexical actants for substitution to be possible (see
Appendix D).

Functions, Motives and Thematic Roles

"Functions as units of action are narrative invariants, while the agents performing those
actions are textual variables" (Nôth, 1990, p. 371; see also Propp, 1928; Eco, 1979;
Greimas, 1983). Therefore, the narrative utterance, defined as NU=F(A) (where
NU=narrative utterance, F=function and A=actant), is based upon a logic of relationships
between the thematic counterparts of actants operationalized in the possible lexical world of
the text as actors according to the categories of "knowledge", "desire" and "power" (see
Greimas, 1983). Thematic roles embody an entire narrative program made up of shifts in
temporal sequence and are capable of actualizing and of summing up, through syntactic
analysis, the body of cognitive and affective mental activities performed by the reader to
make the necessary linkages between the actantial roles accomplished by lexemes on a
syntactic-grammatical level and the resulting thematic roles on a semantic-content level
which creates characters, or actors. From this perspective, if we look at occurential doing,
or pragmatic action, in a narrative tract and define it on a grammatical level but with
semantic investiture, it is possible to glean from the analysis a thematic element that
 63

produces the semantic field of logic from which the occurential level of narrative can be
structured and wherein it lies (Eco, 1979; Greimas, 1983).

ants

denigrative + escape
communicative search

(Cognitive) Effie (Occurential)

Figure 14. Thematic roles of the subjects in terms of cognitive and occurential
doing.

In Effie, the thematic roles—both cognitive and occurrential — are derived from the
semantic disclosures which result in the "deepest" levels of intensional meaning making
that place the actants in a syntactic relation of binary opposition determining searcher vs.
escapee and communicator vs. denigrator. The predication of the action in the expression
/ran to get away from/ in NSI concretizes the actantial roles of the subjects around which
the narrative sequence (and all of NP1) is syntactically structured for the reader to
semantically realize the virtual properties of the language manifest on the lexematic level in
the form of figures that are extended into discourse configurations through the thematic
roles of the actants. (see Appendix D)
The discoursive level of structure also aims at eliciting the processes utilized by the
reader to test expectations and forecasts on the level of the lexical fabula. To recognize a
given lexical fabula, the reader must first identify a narrative topic, or main theme, through
abductions built from micropropositions to macropropositions during the course of
reading. The abduction process functions as a series of cumulatively effected mental
hypotheses to be tested through trial-and-error against the actual textual verifications of the
lexical fabula. Narrative sequences one to thirteen in Effie contain parallel actantial
structures embodied in three thematic roles manifest by two main actors, Effie and the
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object searched out to talk with:

NSI-XI: subject vs. object [searcher vs. escapee]

sender vs. receiver [communicator vs. denigrator]
NSXI-XIII: helper vs. opponent [rescuer vs. adversary]

Figure 15. The narrative as determined by actantial and thematic roles.

Ironically, the actor Effie is the simultaneous textual representation of the narrative
functions performed by the villain-exile, the helper and the heroine. This is a literal
contradiction but it is figuratively and thematically plausible in the possible world of the
lexical text if we consider the sum total of narrative utterances as two separate narrative
programs (NP1/NP2), or story lines, based upon the actantial and thematic roles of the
main textual subject, /Effie/. Then, the first phase of the story in NP1 ends after N S X
where the protagonist transforms from villain-exile to heroine in the form of helper and
adopts a new actorial role as actantial and thematic subject in relation to other subjects
within the cognitive and occurential doing of the second narrative program (see Appendix
D).
The sequencing of NP1 and NP2 in figure of functions reveals the importance of the
original conjunction and disjunction based upon individual physical characteristics set up
between Effie, as an actor, and the subsequent subjects presented in the lexical text. The
introductory narrative sequence, NSI in NP1, thematizes the actantial role of the subject
/Effie/ through the relationships created between the lexical subjects according to the
categories of "knowledge", "desire" and "power" and defines the actors which will isolate
the functions, or actorial roles, through the narrative sequence of utterances on micro/macro
levels (Propp, 1928; Greimas, 1983; Eco, 1976). The comparison of /Effie/ with /the other
ants/ in NSI can be said to be the result of a gradual process of isolating through the
reader's semantic disclosures the physical properties, both natural and static (immutable),
 65

natural and kinetic (mutable), that are common to the actors in the sequence and to
differentiate later through disjunctive contrasts the virtual properties of the lexemes that will
be necessary to distinguish between textual actors on the thematic level. While functioning
as textual subject-actant and possessing both thematic and actantial roles to single out the
themes of search, escape and isolation which are reiterated in the plot structure from NSI to
NSX, /Effie/, as a lexeme, is invested with potential textual meaning—Effie is a gregarious
ant with a large mouth with a natural compunction for loud conversation whom other ants
and animals wish to escape from cognitive or occurential contact with.

Actantial Structures and the Level of Fabula

The conceptualization of fabula is the result of the continuing series of abductions made
by the reader about the possible world of the text and is experienced step-by-step during the
course of the reading act with regard to how the textual actors change or develop at each
phase of the story (Eco, 1979). Left to wonder, the reader , therefore, sets up probabilities
and disjunctions about the characters, the actions and the events during the course of the
narrative in the form of macropropositions.
The reduction of the fabulaic elements of the lexical text into a series of narrative
structures (à la Propp, 1928) is an inevitable prerequisite in order for the reader to travel
further toward the "deepest" intensional levels of meaning that the lexical plot reveals as
manifest in the actantial structures of the lexical text from which to abstract the lexical
fabula. The reduction of those same elements to binary opposites in the form of
conjunctions and disjunctions (see Bremond, 1970; Greimas, 1983) can then be performed
to identify the elementary ideological structures of the text. The text, however, in narrating
the steps of its own construction at the linear level of manifestation, creates its own model
reader. It guides the reader from beginning to end in how to read it through the steps of its
production (Eco, 1979; Greimas, 1983; Iser, 1978) and elicits specific expectations on the
level of the lexical fabula. For example, through subdivisions in chapters, paragraphs and
other graphic devices determining lexical text construction, the temporal distribution of
 66

narrative action is spread across the surface intensional levels as warnings, connotative
hints, allusions, innuendoes, devices of suspense, archetype, etc., which lead the reader to
expectations and forecasts in the form of propositional statements (Eco, 1979). The
confirmation or contradiction of the reader's hypotheses is then settled in the final outcomes
of the lexical fabula in terms of veridiction, or "truthfulness" of textual world structures,
and are validated by the accessibility of the possible world depicted. After NSI, it can be
forecast by the reader that Effie's voice will offend other creatures in the possible world
created within the narrative structures of the discourse. The interplay of lexical actants is
set up according to the functions of the actors that govern the form of the narrative
utterances by establishing distinct thematic roles to be acted out in the plot. Therefore, the
narrative sequences are paralleled with respect to the main actantial subject /Effie/ as
determinant of the lexical plot and lexical fabula. It is indeed expected that the reader infer
this important conclusion in order to predict the subsequent progression of the lexical plot
as a series of failed attempts at communication by the protagonist through which the lexical
text engenders an elementary ideological framework manifest as world structures: Good
vs. Bad, Positive vs. Negative, Life vs. Death, Nature vs. Culture (Greimas, 1983). What
is considered acceptable or unacceptable in the possible world created according to the
textual world structures established through the reader's abductions of the lexical fabula, is
held up for scrutiny and judged according to the reader's already formulated schemata.

Ultimately, to create a sense of empathy for the character as victim of her own prowess,
the actantial structures in the lexical text of Effie work toward the thematization of the terms
by which competence is measured in its possible world. It is true that Effie may be
"mistress of mayhem" but it is a naive and inadvertent malice caused by an immutable
character trait deemed as flawed within the possible world of the lexical text which brings
about the succession of accidents that occur through the interplay of the characters during
the course of narrative action. The succession of failed attempts at communication because
of the lack of understanding displayed by other actors is the reason for the gradual isolation
and resulting insularization of the protagonist. This leads to visual and verbalized textual
expressions of the actor's feelings of inferiority and self-pity through which an emotional
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identification between the reader and the protagonist is achieved—a bond of psychic and
emotional pathos for the plight of essentially a likable character who is pray to fortune and
bound to physical nature. Consequently, the dramatic tension in the plot is heightened
since the narrative structure of the lexical text, as reinforced by the visual text, works
toward the movement of epiphany, or revelation, where the protagonist's true heroic
potential is actualized in the suspenseful climax of events.

Archetype, Genre and the Hero

It is at this point that the reader cannot distinguish between the possible imagined events
and the events as they have actually occurred to that point of the story (Eco, 1979; Lotman,
1990). Therefore, the reader bases his/her thinking upon intertextual frames of reference
rather than logic (Eco, 1979), the essential criteria being verisimilitude of the lexical fabula
to events having previously occurred in other stories. Also, the intertextual frames of
reference, or experiences of other stories where animals are endowed with human
characteristics and pursue both psychological and physical human goals, accessed by the
reader, make the story of Effie more palatable as fiction and stimulate the suspension of
disbelief; since, the reader may refer to these intertextual frames as ready made literary
topoi, or common narrative schemes of understanding, according to the structural
archetypes set up through genre (Frye, 1957; Eco, 1976; 1984). In providing an
intertextual frame of reference for the reader, the story line in Effie is a rather common
adaptation of the literary archetype containing the anti-heroine in the low-mimetic mode
(Frye, 1957) of "Cinderella" or "The Ugly Duckling", where through the intervention of a
helper, in the form of either a preternatural or natural agent, the protagonist succeeds in
gaining peer acceptance and secures a happy ending. In fact we have come to expect the
anthropomorphic characterization of zoomorphic life forms in children's literature since we,
as a culture, name animals in an effort to befriend them and rationalize the logic of the
relationship between human and non-human beings through anthropomimesis . It is in this
sense that Effie is a fable and can be read and interpreted on at least two levels: 1) the
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story of an ant with a special power of voice or 2) an animal story containing a moral
lesson and allegorical to some degree when juxtaposed against the human condition.
The story of Effie is poised toward the tragic until the commoedic peripeteia, or reversal
(used here in a non-tragic sense) where, again through naively motivated action, the
protagonist is transformed from well-meaning villain-exile to unexpected heroine. Even if
it is not specifically stated in the lexical text in order to reinforce the mood of suspense until
the fabula unfolds naturally as a complete course of "global" narrated events, the reader
may suspect such an outcome as elicited through macropropositional abductions. For
example, when the reluctant interlocutors return in haste toward Effie in NSX, there is a
definite attempt at communication made by two of the other subjects (e.g., the spider says
/At a time like this?/ and the caterpillar interjects /Run for your life/) What the reader is left
to abduce from the dialogue and the pragmatic action in the visual sequence is that danger is
imminent and the threat is serious enough to propel the actors toward a previously
interpreted and known danger—Effie. The protagonist, however, decontextualizes the
action and misinterprets it as a change of heart on the part of the other subjects. At this
point, the reader is more aware of the gravity of the situation than is the protagonist who
still pursues the original motives for communication and is left perplexed. This is revealed
in the questions posed by Effie (e.g., /You've changed your mind?/, /Welcome back!/,
/Have you come to talk with me?/) all uttered by the protagonist under the adverbial
qualification of /hopefully/. It is clear that Effie has misunderstood the cognitive and
occurential dimensions of the action of communication as well as the motives for the
attempt. From a semiotic perspective, the message has been decoded aberrantly through
the proxemics, or body language, of the figures portrayed in the text according to a
physical code of actions where the protagonist interprets the cognitive and occurential doing
of the other actors in light of previous experience. For a short while, the reader may
actually be encouraged into a temporary identification of knowledge with that of the
character because of the sympathetic viewpoint nurtured in the picture book by the portrayal
of the protagonist up to that point in the lexical and visual texts. The visual and lexical texts
working in cross-medial agreement provide the clues necessary to deduce the relational
 69

logic which leads to the correct macroproposition that subsequently disambiguates the
textual subcodes at a later point in the narrative.

Life search vs. escape Death

communication denigration

Figure 16. The motivation for doing in the narrative.

Superimposing the motive for the act of communication upon the doings of the actors in the
specific situation enables the reader to decode the message as «danger», whereas, the
protagonist confuses the motives for the action by relating the action to a context
determined through personal ideological sympathies; therefore, Effie cannot easily interpret
the message through the action in the plot which results in the verbally externalized search
for a possible motive.

The Semiotics of a Possible World: Textual World Structures

The notion of possible textual worlds is situated in the framework of two types of
modal logic manifest in the lexical text discussed thus far: 1) the logic of perception and 2)
the logic of actions (Petôfi, 1973; Eco, 1979). Eco (1979) defines the concept of possible
worlds as follows:

(i) a possible world is a possible state of affairs expressed by a set of

relevant propositions where for every proposition either p or ~p ;

(ii) as such it outlines a set of possible individuals along with their

properties ;

(iii) since some of these properties or predicates are actions, a possible

world is also a possible course of events ;

(iv) since this course of events is not actual, it depends on the propositional
attitudes of somebody; in other words, possible worlds are worlds
imagined, believed, wished, and so on (p. 219).
 70

The concept of the possible world is essential for examining the notion of inferential walks
or forecasts of the lexical fabula and for discriminating between the process of actualizing
discursive structures through semantic disclosures and ascertaining an extensional
framework for the analysis of lexical text. It helps avoid the problems associated with
textual intensions by providing an overfurnished set of textual elements that compose
world structures complete with acting individuals possessing properties and performing
psychic and somatic actions in the courses of possible events. Therefore, the inferential
walks, expectations and predictions both within and without the world of the text, concern
different possible outcomes of the lexical fabula imagined by the reader rather than the
actualization of the lexical and textual meaning according to semantic disclosures made in
relation to the reader's basic lexical dictionary. A possible world, however, is definitely a
rational cultural construct because it arises from the reader's experience as encyclopaedic
knowledge (of which the basic lexical dictionary is a component) where the framework for
the lexical fabula "is a mere spatio-temporal meeting of physical qualities, relations with
other characters, actions performed, or passions suffered" (Eco, 1979, p. 221). For
example, the fact that the discourse reveals that Effie is an /ant/ leads the reader to a certain
set of cognitive and affective mental operations whereby the semantic disclosures are
referenced in terms of a real world entity in relation to the lexical term; however, the
substitution of the reader's real world conception of «ant» with its representation in the
possible lexical and visual world of the text is established through the cross-referencing of
paradigmatic indexes, non-textual and textual, that support the imaginary characterization
of the ant with anthropomorphic properties as in the visual context (e.g., the power of
speech, human-like teeth, footwear, human emotions, etc.) through which the fictive is
established by actualizing the semantic content of the lexematic level of discoursive
structures. The real world references to individuals and their properties in a state of affairs
(situation) is essential and practical since no fictional world is or can be totally autonomous
as a schema for a possible world and still be consistent in providing a comprehensible plot,
a viable fabula and convincing actors. There must be reference to some real world
constructs in the form of individuals, anthropomorphic or zoomorphic, their properties and
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events or situations which are in fact representational cultural constructs because a possible
world interpretation is idiosyncratic in its dependence upon individual conceptualization
systems and ideational schemata (see Eco, 1979). The fact that a text is subject to
potentially different readings due to individual experiences results in interpretive openness.
It may be conceivable in the possible world set up by the lexical text of Effie that
zoomorphic forms (insects and mammals) are capable of anthropomorphic type
communication and this fact may well be compatible with some individual ideologies or
cultural attitudes but incompatible with others. Even so, there is a certain amount of
narcotizing of some properties and blowing up of others on the level of discoursive
structures through semantic disclosures which must occur for this trope to be accepted as
an integral literary and visual stylistic device.
The diagnostic measure by which the validity of the properties given to the individuals
are judged on the basis of logicality or factualness is in essential relation to the textual topic
pertinent to the discourse on the level of narrative. Consequently, the accessibility of the
possible world is affected because it is the discoursive topic which outlines the textual
world structure(s), not in a broad or "global" sense (Eco, 1979), but as a narrow
determinate used for its interpretation in relation to the real world as represented mentally
and referenced linguistically in the reader's encyclopaedia of associations. Therefore, the
textual verifications of the topic (as discussed earlier in isotopy) actually limit the
associations which are established as possible world structures because the discoursive
topic is very specific in identifying and guiding the semantic association on levels of
meaning analysis. Through the reader's semantic disclosures, the characters, the actions
and the events in the plot of Effie are determined specifically to produce a possible world
which engages the reader's imaginative identification and aesthetic cooperation in the
suspension of disbelief whereby the fictional purpose of communication is acknowledged
and accepted. The fact that the realism of the textual world structures projected in the
picture book does not coincide with or correspond to the world actualized outside of the
lexical text does not limit cognitive and affective mental associations or aesthetic responses
that aid the reader's construction and experience of the fictional world of Effie, but
 72

promotes the juxtaposition of the actual, or real, world structures with the possible, or
fictional, textual world structures and corresponding individuals with specified properties
in the picture book.

Actual World «ant» W : X I speech clothes emotions looks (-)

Q

Fictional World «ant» W, : X 2 + + + +

Figure 17. Contrastive properties of the subject in two world structures.

In essence, the two individuals (XI and X2) depicted in the two world structures ( W and 0

Wi) are not the same individuals but X 2 is a supernumerary to X I since it differs in

essential properties and, through disjunction, results in the stylization of X 2 as an

anthropomorphized version of X I . The stylistic difference of personification within the
two world structures is necessary for the lexical fabula of the possible world with respect to
characters' actions, wishes, beliefs and motives to be viable in the genre of the fable and to
be ideologically successful in conveying the dianoia (as an overall theme or didactic
purpose) of the text.
In essence, the textual world structures manifest in the lexical text reflect a self-
regulated possible world established by the author through language to guide the reader on
two codic levels: 1) a deigetic code, or the narrative aspect of discourse construed as the
relations between the lexemes at an actantial level which are predicated in the textual world
structures as true or false (see Eco, 1979; Greimas, 1983); and 2) a proairetic code, where
the code of actions contained in the lexical text treated thematically as a syntagmatic unit
yields a moral lesson (Barthes, 1964; Frye, 1957). It is the combination of textual world
structures related through narrative and the direction of the narrative programs of the lexical
text that give rise to thematic oriented questions in the reader which require answers: Why
does the ant speak? What does that mean? Is there a reason for giving the ants and other
zoomorphic beings human traits? Is the protagonist's voice really as abrasive as the text
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indicates? Does the protagonist have no redeeming features that merit the reward of
friendship? The answers to those and similar questions are thematically oriented since, in
this particular instance, Effie as a text is closed because "it is immoderately 'open' to every
possible interpretation" (Eco, 1979, p. 8) and is determined by genre and fictional, as well
as, moral purpose.
As a traditional literary archetype of westernized culture, the fable is engendered with
specific attributes which the reader has come to expect of the genre. Even a beginning
reader who is in the process of developing intertextual competence is alerted to similarities
and differences in story elements which are assimilated and determined through the overall
thematic intentions of a specific genre. The textual world structures manifest in fable, of
which Effie is a representative work, demand the temporary freezing of what the reader has
come to expect from the realistic genre of fiction and promote an acceptance of the non-
mimetic function of the text as it turns inward on itself centripetally (see Bakhtin, 1981;
Frye, 1957; Lotman, 1990; Todorov, 1977; Hirsch, 1983). Scholes (1974) explains,

Every literary text is the product of a pre-existing set of possibilities. Therefore,

literary study must operate by proceeding from the set of possibilities toward the
individual work, or from, the work toward the set of possibilities which is in fact a
generic concept. Genres are the connecting links between individual literary works
and the universe of literature (p. 128).

Genres are also connecting links between the writer and the reader within a particular
cultural context since there are demands made upon the writer to communicate within a pre-
specified literary tradition, a relevant and culturally viable message to the reader for the
purpose of either entertaining or distracting, of being didactic or teaching a moral lesson.
Therefore, the genre determines the accessibility of the textual world structures by placing
the work in an historical and literary context dependent upon style and message, or more
formally, as genre and theme (Scholes, 1974; Frye, 1957).

The aesthetic function of the plot is to bring the arrangement of motifs (e.g., recurrent
images, themes, etc.) to the attention of the reader in a causal chronological order so as to
 74

engage the reader emotionally and to develop the theme, or overall didactic purpose, of the
communication. To this end, the genre provides the familiar formalization in structure of a
lexical text which is necessary for the communication of the message to be expressed
through a fictional literary work and to be summarized by the reader as propositional
attitudes or opinions. For example, it really does not matter to the reader that Effie contains
non-realistic portrayals of zoomorphic forms because in itself that is not the purpose of the
attempt at communication of a message on the part of the text but a feature of the formalized
structure of the text's genre by which the purpose of communication is fulfilled. It is
expected, rather than rejected, in the possible world of the picture book, as representative
of the fable genre. The abstraction of an overall state of affairs presented and relayed
through the interaction of characters on the level of cognitive and occurential action builds
through the reader's abductions from micropropositions on the level of discoursive
structures to macropropositions where it is possible to ascertain the lexical fabula.
Consequently, the ideological framework of the lexical text—embodied in the propositional
attitudes of the characters as cognitive and occurential doing in the form of verbalized and
non-verbalized actions—can be determined through relations of conjunction and disjunction
which yield a plethora of possible worlds. The textual world structures gleaned by the
reader through the characters and the actions and the total of events represented are then
judged accordingly by the extent to which those propositional attitudes are engendered
within the text. The reversal of Effie's fate and that of the other ants is dependent upon a
coincidental moment of action which alters the elementary ideological framework of the
text. There can be no doubt that this is the moment of climax in the plot where the
protagonist fulfills heroic potential through the help of an unknowing agent. The plot has
been building to this moment of triumph after a series of successive failures expected by the
reader. The need to release this tension built in the plot through the continual delay is only
achieved because the protagonist is frustrated by the lack of individuals with which to talk.
It is a moment of stasis, or heightened still-framing of anxiety, where the rope of the plot is
stretched so tightly that any vibration in the course of the narrative structures will cause it to
snap. It foreshadows what the reader expects, a tragic resolution. Ironically, the natural
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propensity in the protagonist for loud speech—which has been denigrated thus far in the
possible textual world—brings the situation about to its commoedic resolution and the
subject gains heroic status in the process. The themes can be abstracted by the reader in the
form of different propositional attitudes expressed as relationships of conjunction and
disjunction within the lexical text. The plot, consequently, fulfills the thematic expectations
of the fable genre as literary archetype in the commoedic mode when the story can then be
determined successfully on a thematic level as an allegory because the world structures
predicated in the text support the reader's conclusion through veridiction.

Summary

Through the application of the method for the semiotic analysis of the picture book
outlined in Chapter Three, cognitive, affective, and aesthetic aspects of meaning-making
are addressed in Chapter Four by providing pragmatic (Peirce, 1931) and theoretical
explanations in semiotic terms for both the intensional and extensional acts performed by
the reader in relation to the linguistic structures of signification identified in the lexical text
of Effie. The method of semiotic analysis utilized in Chapter Four offers ample dimensions
for an examination of lexical text according to the research purpose(s) stated in Chapter One
so as to facilitate a comprehensive study of how the lexical signs and codes function on
numerous levels to engender the picture book form with meaning-expressive potential.
Within the picture book genre, however, a "reading" of the text lies not only in decoding
the lexical cues by which a reader synthesizes meaning, but is further qualified in relation to
the co-existent visual signs and codes of the text used as the expressive form of pictorial
content. The following chapter furthers the semiotic analysis of the picture book while
considering the levels of interdependence between the lexical and visual components of the
text and the viewer's intensional and extensional acts of meaning-making.
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CHAPTER FIVE

T H E SEMIOTICS O F T H E VISUAL T E X T

Overview

Chapter Five illustrates the specific applications of the method outlined in Chapter
Three in a formal semiotic analysis of the signs and codes comprising the visual textual
form of the picture book Effie in relation to the lexical text and the reader's cognitive,
affective and aesthetic responses as viewer. The intensional and extensional acts performed
in visual meaning-making are explained in both pragmatic (Peirce, 1931) and theoretical
terms according to the semiotic principles of textual analysis (discussed in Chapter T w o ) .
References to other picture books, Tuesday (Weisner, 1991), Tar beach (Ringgold, 1991)
and The eleventh hour: A curious mystery (Base, 1989), are made to show how the method
is applied to a diversity of examples in the picture book genre.

The Elements of Visual Text

Any work of visual, or pictorial, text achieves its existence through color or value
(lightness and darkness) arrangements. A visual text, like a lexical text, can be examined
according to the syntactic elements of its construction and the semantic purpose of its
composition at both a microstructural level and at macrostructural level of analysis (Eco,
1976; 1984). A t the level of microstructure, the "deepest" visual structures are established
through morphology and function of color, or value, groupings whereby the total formal
compositional elements interact to create thematic meaning at a macrostructural level (see
Saint-Martin, 1987; Arnheim, 1974; Gombrich, 1960; Eco, 1976). To facilitate the
analysis of how a visual text functions at both microstructural and macrostructural levels to
create signifying potential through the separation and organization of color, or value, within
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a visual field, a semiotic methodology may be utilized to identify and explain how the signs
and codes of a visual text interact in the presence of a viewing consciousness which
actualizes the text's meaning potential.

Microstructures: Plastic and Perceptual Variables

Plastic variables are defined as color, value (lightness and darkness) and texture;
perceptual variables are defined as line, shape, form, vectoriality (focal point and
directional tension) and implantation (position/balance) (Saint-Martin, 1987). The
combination of plastic and perceptual variables within a visual text constitutes the body of
textual articulation within the visual field of the viewer at points of ocular centration. The
rapid peripheral scanning of a visual field on the part of the viewer is essentially an attempt
to link the focal points, or microstructures, of the viewer's intensional ocular concentration
(Arnheim, 1974). It is an exploratory analysis of the visual variables, plastic and
perceptual, manifest in the text which the viewer must perform so as to locate the
transformations of these visual variables in relation to each other spatially (see Arnheim,
1974; Saint-Martin, 1987). Consequently, the process results in a cognitive and affective,
conscious and subconscious awareness of the visual elements (color, value, texture, line,
shape and form) within the microstructural framework of the visual field which are
dependent upon perception and the aesthetic experiences evoked in the viewer in the act of
meaning-making.

Plastic Variables: Color, Value and Texture

The Semiotics of Color

Color is not an inherent property of objects in our visual field. It is the product of a
perceptual phenomenon consisting of the interaction between light and an object. White
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light is composed of a spectrum of light rays (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet) of
which the red light ray has the longest wave length and the violet light ray the shortest wave
length. Light sources emit all spectral light rays so that they in turn may be either reflected
or absorbed in the object being viewed by the pigment—a synthetic inorganic or organic
substance that enables the reflection or absorption of light from a surface so as to allow for
the perception of color. If all the light rays are reflected, the viewer perceives the object as
white; if all the light rays are absorbed, as black. To perceive a color such as green, all
light rays are absorbed except a predominance of the green light ray which triggers
perception of a green hue on the retina. Green is then seen as a property of the object
viewed. Therefore, color is perceived by the viewer when an object selectively absorbs
and reflects various light rays depending on surface pigment. The array of color variables
are infinite and the possible combination of light rays specifically reflected are indefinite
(see Saint-Martin, 1987; Arnheim, 1974).

Color and Human Perception

There is difficulty in attributing to specific color perceptions definitive qualities in that

human perception of color correlates with numerous variables. Differing chromatic
constitutions seemingly imperceptible to the eye may qualify perceptional stimuli and
physiological variants of perceptual mechanisms within individuals can disqualify the
homogeneity of color's physiological effect(s):

Two human eyes do not see color in the same way in a spontaneous way, before
being subjected to a gestaltian type of adaptation . . . These differences are
accentuated with age and are sometimes greater from one individual to the next,
because of the coloration of crystalline as well as individual variables of the yellow
pigment of the macula lutea, in which the capacities of absorption of short waves
may vary in the different groups". (Saint-Martin, 1987, p. 21)

Colors modify the perceptual stimulation experienced by the viewer due to the conditions of
perceptual contact in which he/she is placed. Since no color or predominance of a single
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color ray can be viewed in complete isolation and because color perception is modified
through its juxtaposition with various chromas (or hues), colors are inherently dependent
on their surrounding milieu to define the influences they may concur upon optic perception.
Because of the indeterminacy of the dynamics of color due to influences extraneous to the
hue itself, semiotic theoreticians of visual text have lacked a quantifiable base from which
to discuss the potential nuances of color and its dynamic properties (Noth, 1990; Saint-
Martin, 1987; Arnheim, 1974). Ironically, it is the postulated structural dyad of visual
textual articulation and the arbitrariness of human perception in classifying colors which
have caused semioticians to disagree about the ontology and nature of color as substance
and matter (Goethe, 1963; Sonesson, 1989). It is, however, in relation to human
perceptual processes that color has been studied and defined.

The first step in realizing color is to perceive it as differences within a visual field (see
Arnheim, 1974). Colors (chromas or hues) reflect a distinct value (lightness or darkness),
tint (white additive to pure color), shade (black additive to pure color) and intensity
(pureness of color). Although responses to color, or color vibrations, lack a scientifically
quantifiable method for delineating the subject's neuro-physiological viewing reactions, it
has been identified and recognized by color theoreticians (Arnheim, 1974; Goethe, 1963;
Verity, 1980; Gombrich, 1960) that color is capable of significantly affecting emotional
responses in individuals and of evoking innate psychological reactions within the viewer
which are stimulated by associations derived from the internalization of color as perceived
in natural elements within the external environment.
Color is an important vehicle for identifying, comprehending and ordering the features
of our external world and possesses immediate signifying potential. At a pragmatic (see
Peirce, 1931) level, color takes on a symbolic meaning in relation to external referents
where the primary definition of the object(s) perceived relates to connections made through
one's psychological world. Arnheim (1974) points out that "Red is said to be exciting
because it reminds us of fire, blood and revolution. Green calls up the refreshing thought
of nature and blue is cooling like water" (p. 368). In social communication, color has
come to contain metaphorical expressive potential in delineating human emotional states
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through language. For example, the phrase /seeing red/ is used to denote a state of
heightened anxiety and emotional fervor relative to normalcy—anger. The basis for the
mental connections between the color red and the state of agitation which it conveys
conceptually is purely arbitrary and subject to the influences of cultural convention (Eco,
1976). Even though the affects of learning (e.g., experience, culture, education, etc.) can
influence an individual's reaction to color stimuli, the affects of color upon psychological
and aesthetic responses are too spontaneous to be solely attributable to the acculturation
process (Gombrich, 1960; Arnheim, 1974). Eysenck (1988) suggests that "the ability to
make correct aesthetic judgements . . . seems to transcend cultural national boundaries. It
is related to some objective core of beauty which is difficult to define, but which has been
measured with some success in simple colors, color combinations and simple forms" (p.
151). It is in this basic sense that colors express emotional states and that the choices made
by an artist are dependent upon the desired emotional experience which he/she wishes to
impart to the viewer. It is generally acknowledged that the colors yellow, orange and red
can be employed to convey an emotional sense of warmth and cheerfulness that is lacking
from the cooler, more subdued, psychic associations promulgated in the viewer by green,
blue and violet (Goethe, 1963). Although no scientific hypothesis has been established to
correlate specific psychological reactions to color in subjects, it has been ascertained that
colors of strong brightness and high saturation and the hues of long wave vibration,
produce a state of excitement (Arnheim, 1974; Goethe, 1963; Itten, 1973). In essence, a
bright red is more active than a subdued, greyish blue. Clinical research into color
psychology suggests that individuals display color preferences which are directly related to
the emotional impact of the colors (Verity, 1980). The results of the experimental studies
were based on the selection of colors and the ordering of such selections so as to reveal
personality traits the individual holds in affinity to the emotional aspects and potential of
colors.
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Properties of Color Formation: The Color Wheel

Ultimately, colors, cool or warm, are subject to the affects of color combinations,
values and intensities within a visual field. Colors change in relation to their chromatic
surroundings (see Arnheim, 1974; Saint-Martin, 1987). Goethe describes the relational
properties of colors in Theory of color.

Single colors affect us, as it were pathologically, carrying us away to particular

sentiments. Vividly striving or softly longing, we feel elevated toward nobility or
lowered toward the ordinary. However, the need for totality inherent in our organ
guides us beyond this limitation. It sets us free by producing the opposites of the
particulars forced upon it and thus brings about a satisfying completeness, (cited in
Arnheim, 1974, p. 358)

A single color will give a different appearance depending on the colors adjacent to it.
Certain color combinations intensify the dynamics of an illustration while others serve to
produce a more serene effect. Using the Twelve-Color Wheel (the most common
organizational framework for the twelve basic colors), secondary and tertiary colors can be
identified. The three primary colors which form a triangle on the wheel (blue, red and
yellow) can not be derived by mixing pigments. Secondary colors are produced by mixing
adjacent pigments and are located centrally between the primaries. Six tertiary colors are
mixtures of a primary and adjacent secondary colors. Colors opposite each other on the
color wheel intensify their own brightness (especially at full intensity) when placed
adjacently in a visual field and are subsequently classified as complementary colors. When
red and green (opposites on the color wheel) are placed side-by-side, both colors are
perceived as more intense and dynamic than would they be if placed in a context where
their complements were unavailable. This technique is often employed by artists when
their purpose is to produce brilliant color effects which serve to impart a compelling
vibrancy to the image. Consequently, if not used throughout an entire composition,
complementarity could serve as a point of capturing and focusing the viewer's attention.
Using complementary colors within close proximity of each other in a visual text is termed
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a simultaneous contrast which suggests that one color simultaneously intensifies the
brilliancy of the other. The front cover of Effie demonstrates how complementary colors
serve to draw attention to a color designated as a significant focal area(s) for the viewer's
gaze to be directed. Green frames the ant, Effie, on the horizontal pictorial axis while red,
intensified by the green surroundings which border the central figure, is used for the
lettering to feature the title, Effie in the upper left quadrant. Similarly, the brilliant red
chroma of the tongue creates a second area of interest which competes for the viewer's
attention by creating tension between the focal points. Effie's tongue draws the viewer's
attention while exuding a vibrancy which is itself imparted to the organ and serves to create
two primary focal areas. Before viewing the book, the reader can in no way be precise in
predicting the visual plot or fabula (the thematic context and content will be actualized at a
later phase); however, the intensity of the chromatic motif as well as the intentional
focusing of attention upon certain topological regions in the visual plane allow the viewer to
make inferences based on initial reactions to colors which promote an emotional tension or
mood. Had the title and tongue been depicted in a pale, soft tint of yellow, the effect(s) of
the total image would have been less dynamic and perhaps would have been less likely to
succeed in alerting the viewer, consciously or subconsciously, to the quick-paced plot of
the book, but made allusion to a tranquil emotional landscape of a peaceful story line about
an ant. In this depiction of the protagonist, Effie is an effervescent ant being with special
powers of speech as indicated by the large human-like mouth and the active intensely red
tongue.

Analogous colors (colors adjacent to each other on the color wheel) when used within a
picture plane, function to create a harmonious unity of expression due to their close
relationship within the color wheel. Such combinations of colors are not derivative of
states of psychic and emotional agitation within the viewer, but possess an internal self-
consistency of properties which manifests itself in the quality of sameness. In Effie on
page twenty-nine, when the encounter between the protagonist, as hero, and the elephant,
the helping agent, isolates the theme of friendship as the motivating force for both subjects'
need to communicate, the undercurrent of desire for a commoedic resolution which has
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been building to a climax in the plot and fabula manifests itself in an effusion of yellow and
orange hues (pink also) which envelop Effie and the elephant in a rich warmness. While
the dense greens used in the foreground frame the inner scene, a contrast is achieved by
the chromatic disjunction. In this way, the artist uses analogous colors to serve as an
objective correlative for the harmonious relation between the two subjects and to establish
a type of pathetic fallacy where the external environment is sympathetic to the psychic and
emotional states of the characters. This is also the only point in the picture book where the
color scheme utilized for the sky is altered significantly. The picture book Tuesday
(Weisner, 1991) contains an analogous color scheme of warm green and blue hues which
also characterizes the dream-like and ethereal compositional motif of the nocturnal
adventures of the frogs. Essentially, the mood is subdued and almost silent as the frogs
hover on lilypads high above an unsuspecting sleepy town.

Color and Value

Another property of color which influences our experiences of it is value

(lightness or darkness). A work containing predominantly light values can serve to convey
an emotionally pleasing effect (e.g., cheerfulness), while one containing primarily dark
values can be perceived oppositely as foreboding or sombre. In first introducing the
elephant to the viewer of Effie, the artist chose to portray the subject in its naturalistic
environment using a preponderance of colors light in value thereby toning down the
traditional emotional perceptions of the elephant as an intimidating creature (chiefly because
of its massive structure). The representation of the animal as amiable and unintimidating is
achieved in this way through the visual text even before the lexical portion of the text has
conveyed any information about the actual nature of the character. Thus, the light values of
the color scheme undercut any negative visual stimuli which may support an impulse in the
viewer to actualize pejorative associations with respect to the subject. The negative
properties of elephants are effectively narcotized. In fact, the suspense that is built into the
plot before the elephant is identified to be the supposed ominous and evil persona whose
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shadow covers the page in dark values is really undercut after the viewer is allowed to see
how harmless the creature really appears. It is the sudden shift from dark to light values
after a static moment which builds dramatic tension that visually reinforces the theme of
epiphany. Effie has found a friend that she no longer needs to run away from. It is a new
source of life and a rejuvenation of hope. The fabula is then lifted to another level where
the previous actions of the characters that hinged upon denial and escape are juxtaposed
with the promise of acceptance and friendship.
Contrasts in value can also be used to initiate vectoriality (focal point and directional
tensions) within a picture plane in that the viewer's attention can be focused to certain areas
because of contrasting value regions in relation to the predominant chromatic hue of the
visual stimuli. One page twenty-eight when Effie meets the elephant, she is but a tiny dot
in the visual plane; however, in using a dark value as a contrast to the light values of the
elephant and the scenery, the visual text immediately gravitates the viewer's attention
toward the direction of the minute ant form instead of the elephant form which is much
larger in dimensions and proportions within the pictorial plane. This example serves to
designate emphasis upon the power which value contrast can achieve in visual text since the
differences in proportion of the two subjects is not really a factor in determining the focal
point of the viewer's attention.

Intensity and Luminosity

Colors can also be classified according to intensity, or pureness, of chromatic

representation and luminosity, or brightness. The luminosity of the color pigment depends
on the spectral structure of the light reflected by the pigment itself. For example, yellow
appears the brightest of all because it is nearest to white and violet the least bright because it
is nearest to black. Colors of high intensity and high luminosity convey a lively and
dynamic quality to the visually created mood. Also, since every hue has its own individual
luminosity, the differences in luminous intensity of different colored surfaces on the same
plane bring out by contrast the diverse lightness or darkness of the colors themselves and
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create illusory movements and varieties of structural effects. Many of the colors used in
Effie (e.g., red and green) are high in intensity and color saturation thus reinforcing the
energetic mood generated in the viewer by the hyperbolic activity of the protagonist and the
quick-paced action of the linear visual narrative. The intensity of the colors used in Tar
beach (Ringold, 1991) fluctuates with the vicissitudes of the narrator's emotions and alerts
the viewer of narrative epiphanies. When the narrator describes a vignette from a childhood
dream which is especially pleasing, the intensity and saturation of the colors increases and
the artist supports the optimistic mood of the text by choosing combinations of
complementary colors to enhance the effect in vivid patterns and textures.
Low intensity colors immediately convey to the viewer a more subdued portrayal of the
character's actions and result in the slowing down of the plot. Again, intensity and
luminosity contrast can be used to direct the attention of the viewer to areas that stand out as
discordant focal points in relation to the remaining visual field which would create
vectoriality, or directional tensions, within the image. When Effie opens her mouth to yell
and save the ant hill, the frame is engulphed by the shape of a mouth and the excited
vibrations of her loud voice is conveyed through the selected depiction of the "roar" (see
page twenty). The mouth, portrayed as the hollow expanse of a cavern, is depicted in a
very dark value of red and, concurrently, a red of very low intensity is framed by a
brilliantly luminous red tongue and above it a uvula also high in chromatic intensity but less
bright. The viewer's eye is drawn back and forth between the tongue and the uvula almost
emulating the explosive vocal vibrations that would be evoked within the scream of the
protagonist.

Color can also be implemented within the illustration in conjunction with black, white
and grey values. It is generally agreed by art theoreticians that these are not colors but are
neutrals . Warm colors which are considered in themselves as active, again depending in
degree on intensity, luminosity and value, seen in conjunction with black, gain in energy
and passive colors, from the warm hues placed next to black, lose energy. Active colors
seen next to white lose energy and passive colors increase their potential for creating a
cheerful mood. Effie begins with a diagonal curving line of black ants on a high intensity
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field of yellow. The yellow is made more active by the placement of black ants within the
picture plane which accentuates the busy mood of the image and the industrious activity the
ants, in themselves, are a part of. The foreground tends to project toward the viewer to
suggest an expansive visual field and reinforce the illusion of diagonal and horizontal
motion (see Kandinsky, 1976).

Haptic Aspects of Vision: Textural Inscapes

Riegl identified the haptic vision as "capable of touching with the eye" (cited in
Gandelman, 1991, p. 5), not merely brushing but penetrating the surface and finding
aesthetic pleasure in texture(s). The optic vision is concerned with scanning objects
according to their outlines or linearity and angularity (see Lowenfeld, 1952). What is the
relationship between the senses of vision and touch?
This perspective of correlating touch with vision was first developed by Descartes and
then elaborated by Berkeley as follows:

The locating of the objects in the world and their identification—what is today
called pattern recognition—and even more so the evaluation of the distance between
the observing eye and the points of his focusing on the surface of these objects are
synaesthetic operations. The purely optical (without synaesthesia) is only capable of
apprehending points on a plane surface, (cited in Gandelman, 1991, p. 6)

The traditional Greek meaning of the word synaesthesia (cruvecrôiaia) is translated as

sensitivity to and empathy with a given psychological and emotional state of another person
or thing. Here, however, the sense of empathy and sympathy which allows for human
beings to experience and show touching emotionalism is transferred to the tactile aspects of
vision as an empathetic aesthetic experience. In essence, viewing a work of art is one step
in experiencing its depth, both as spirit and as substance, while establishing one's point of
physical, psychological and emotional relation to the forms perceived.
Texture produces a very tactile quality within the experience of the viewer. The
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textured image connects the sense of sight with the sense of touch. Through visual
representations of texture, one can achieve empathy with what the depicted scheme would
feel like were it to escape from the two-dimensional page surface in which it is entrapped.
Therefore, texture conveys the surface qualities of objects. In a two-dimentional visual
field, such as that provided in a picture book format, variations in light and dark values
create the illusion of surface qualities by which focal interest can be achieved and
maintained. For example, the broad expanse of yellow chroma within the ants'
environment is imbued with variations in texture through the use of shaded pebbles and
slight ridges which add visual interest to the field of yellow. The pattern evoked by the
textures gives the planar surface a "graded" effect which suggests angularity, or depth, as
the eye moves from the foreground to the background along the diagonal trajectory.

Visual distance can also be established within a pictorial plane through textual variation.
Proportional variations of a textural size in relation to relative shapes and forms suggest a
depth of fields within the picture plane. Through the visual text alone, the viewer can
identify a rapid distancing between Effie and the butterfly when the protagonist
inadvertently /blows away/ the butterfly with the power of her voice. In the visual frame
which introduces the butterfly to the plot, the textures of the grass forms are uniform in size
and relative shape. The proceeding frame, after the fall, depicts the butterfly from above,
much smaller in size and surrounded by blades of grass far more densely textured than the
blades around Effie; thus, the differences in proportion suggest to the viewer great distance
between the two characters.
Texture is dependent on the quality and potential of the medium from which it is
produced. Generally, textures are achieved through value and color changes within a
visual field. In the case of Effie, the medium itself possesses a three-dimensional quality
circumventing the need to use value changes to allude to changes in texture and depth. The
plasticine artist preparing the image for photography is actually creating a tactile-textured,
three-dimensional, reliefed surface which, when photographed, creates its own shadows
and highlights which otherwise in paint or other dry mediums would have had to be
achieved through the application of chroma and value changes so as to give the illusion of a
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variated surface. The plasticine being pressed and molded by hand leaves indices of the
human hand involved in its formation. The residual finger print textures inform the viewer
of the part a human agent played in the birth and creation of the characters and scenery.
Some of the landscape such as the sand scenes are not produced by hand modeling but by
the spreading of the medium using a spatula-like instrument. This change in surface values
serves to vary the textural quality of the pictorial plane and to create interest through
directional tensions between the focal areas within the composition. Unity of texture(s)
within an artistic composition or similarity of motif adds harmony and cohesiveness to the
image; however, if exaggerated the technique can lend itself to a monotonization of the
visual field which is not likely to capture the interest of the viewer.

Optic Aspects of Vision: Line, Shape and Form as Outscapes

Lines are used in composition to delineate and describe shapes, contours and forms.
Lines may vary greatly in thickness, weight, directional tension and character. Horizontal
lines tend to convey a feeling of repose and serenity; vertical lines a character of stability
and strength. Diagonals impart a feeling of dynamics, energy and action, while curved
lines imply a soft, gentle energy and zig-zagged diagonal lines imply aggressive expression
and energy (see Gombrich, 1960). In Effie, there is a predominance of diagonal lines
throughout the composition with very few horizontal or vertical lines used in the visual
field. The pictorial text serves to fuse the entire visual fabula with the dynamic and kinetic
nature of Effie's character through the selection of diagonal line arrangements that reinforce
the illusion of movement. The elephant on page twenty-nine is defined visually through the
lines showing the positive shape of the elephant against the negative shape of the
background in which the line of value change defines the shape of the elephant as depicted
using curved, flowing contour lines and shapes that suggest to the viewer, the amiable and
gentle character of the ants' new friend. Whereas, the ants on page twenty-two are
portrayed in an arrangement of diagonal angles of lines and shapes serving to convey to the
viewer the over-emphasized frenzy of nervous energy the ants are feeling in the fear of
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losing their lives and their home.

Line can also be implied through a linear positioning of points along a vertical,
horizontal or diagonal axis. The first page of Effie depicts a zig-zagged line of ants moving
up the page. Although the ants are not connected, the regularity of ant shapes within a
linear progression causes the eye to follow directionally alternating diagonals of the
perceived lines. The diagonal format of the line again conveys the industrious and energetic
linear activity of the ants and establishes a character trait that is a natural phenomenon as
well as stereotypical of the species.
Form is similar to shape in that it delineates the boundaries of an object but in contrast it
could be said that "form is the visible shape of content" (Shahn cited in Arnheim, 1974, p.
97). Gombrich (1960) elaborates,

Everything points to the conclusion that the phrase the "language of art" is more
than a loose metaphor, that even to describe the visible world in images we need a
developed system of schemata . . . It has become increasingly clear since the late
nineteenth century that primitive art and child art uses a language of symbols rather
than "natural signs". To account for this fact it was postulated that there must be a
special kind of art grounded not on seeing but rather on knowledge, an art which
operates with "conceptual images". The child—it is argued—does not look at trees;
he is satisfied with the "conceptual" schema of a tree that fails to correspond to any
reality since it does not embody the characteristics of, say, birch or beech, let alone
those of individual trees . . . But we have come to realize that this distinction is
unreal. . . A l l art originates in the human mind, in our reactions to the world rather
than in the visible world itself, and it is precisely because all art is "conceptual" that
all representations are recognizable by their style, (p. 87)

Shape conveys schematic information which enables the mind to translate the visible
schema of an object through an already existent mental encyclopaedia of shapes. Form
adds another dimension of mental modeling to the schema by further delineating the
qualities of the depicted shapes and creating the physical reality as an internal psychic
structure or schematic representation that can be identified linguistically. A form can be
defined contextually in relation to its environment and to a certain degree by the means of
its production. When discussing the form or formal qualities of a work, the term takes on
an alternative nuance of meaning in referring to the visual organization of the work which
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suggests the work's arrangement of pictorial elements ( color, texture, line and shape) and
how they may be arranged to create directional tensions, balance and proportion of
composition. It is this formal aspect which is a major determinate of a work's conventional
features with respect to genre. Abstraction of form detracts from the mimetic
correspondence between life and art (and language) and allows for greater freedom of
interpretation within an unrestricted realm of content. Vraisemblance, or the
representational depiction of forms, demands the codification of form according to external
environmental or contextual constraints which limit interpretive openness (see Eco, 1976).

The Word as Visual Text: Typography and the Shape of Form

Two additional features of form in the visual text elaborate upon or clarify the thematic
concerns of the lexical text by suppressing possible disjunctions between the visual fabula
and the lexical fabula: typography and framing of lexical text. Typography is the selection
of typeset, or the printed form, of visually represented language used in a text. Not only
does each letter of a word have its own unique shape, but all the letters of the word
combined give a shape to the word form. Words then can be arranged in infinite ways to
create sentences and narratives. It is the visual shape of the word that engenders printed
language with meaning potential and expressivity when read. We recognize the shape and
produce the necessary mental operations required to decode the denotative and connotative
aspects of printed words (see Iser, 1978) in a relationship of conjunction or disjunction
with other words in a syntagmatic chain (see Eco, 1976). Therefore, the altering of the
shape of a word can affect its perception if the context of communication is made clear
enough or elaborates a code against which the reader can check mental associations made
with reference to the syntactic and semantic structure of printed language.

In Effie, there is emphasis upon the visual representation of language which must
classify the printed word as a component of "visual text". The positioning of the lexical
text within a visual frame is strategic in focusing the viewer's perceptions upon specific
areas of the visual text which ultimately effects the way a text is read. For example, on
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page one the sentence /Effie came from a long long line of ants/ (p. 1) is at the bottom right
of the page and separated from the conglomerate of ant shapes. The major vectorial
tendency of the visual field is an upward diagonal push which suggests a bottom-up visual
reading that connects the end of the ant line on page one with the ant line on pages two and
three and provides some visual continuity of framed structure. We may speculate, then,
that the reader is intended to view the sentence after a brief first orientation to the visual
field (the converse also being possible) before moving to the next visual frame, the implied
continuation of the first. It should also be noted that the overwhelming cadence of the
sentence is trochaic with three successive accents on /long long line/ to emphasize an
acoustic and visual sense of length through the alliterative properties of the words. Thus,
allowing the reader/viewer to transform the visual configurations into aural sense
impressions of form which also denote and connote meanings as well as promote aesthetic
responses to the text.

The spatialization of the sentences on page three at the upper left and bottom right of the
page works to build suspense by delaying reception of the most thematically important
piece of information: /Effie's voice was like thunder/ (p. 3). The previous sentence is
place at the bottom right, above which, the protagonist is depicted in physical contrast to all
the other ants in the line. The point of view then begins to alternate between Effie's
attempts at communication and the affects of the powerful voice which she posses. The
power of the voice is conveyed through the difference in script size, boldness and case.
When Effie speaks, the words are capitalized in bold upper case letters to emphasize the
difference in volume compared with the narrative voice in the text and the speech of other
characters. The verbs used to characterize the voice of the protagonist (e.g., /boomed/,
/roared/, etc.) are also onomatopoeic of the actual sounds produced and referred to in the
real world in order to index the sound type according to external paradigms of the reader's
experience.
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Vectoriality (Focal Points and Directional Tensions)

The viewer in fronting an illustration is subject to the visual dynamics which constitute
the directional tensions of the image presented. A visual image in its arrangement of
colors, points, surface elements, shapes, lines and forms culminates in a perceptual
experience in which the properties of these visual components compete for the viewer's
attention. In being drawn toward certain points during optical scanning of a visual field,
the eye does not jump from one point to another but follows a linear pattern of movement
toward various elements at specific focalities in the picture plane which attract attention.
Tension manifests between the focal points of ocular centration creating a fluid energy
within the picture plane which draws the viewer's attention around the image. A single
area or point may attract interest and areas of secondary contrast from the mean of pictorial
elements draw attention but only as the eye tires of the dominant variation and moves to
new points in which to encounter fresh stimuli (see Gandelman, 1991).

Directional tensions within a picture plane animate one's experience of the image
through movement caused by the directional tensions. When visual elements differ from
their surroundings in a pictorial text, the eye is compelled toward the difference. A shape
of large proportion will draw attention of focus if encased within an area of small shapes,
just as an angular shape will stand prominent in a scene composed of predominantly curved
shapes. If more than one area pervades as inconsistent to the norm, these points compete
for the viewer's attention resulting in an optic impulse for constant movement within the
visual field. On page twelve of Effie, two forms alienate themselves from the
surroundings: the ant because of its contrasting dark value and the grasshopper because of
its contrasting lighter value. The eye of the viewer is suspended in focal dynamic tension
as it oscillates between the two forms while seeking a final resting position. Isolating an
object from other groupings within the visual plane also directs optical perception to the
area. The overall design, however, must work as a unified whole connecting the isolated
area of optical attraction to the overall design through repetitions of elements such as color,
texture, line, shape or form which exist within the primary focal points elsewhere in the
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illustration. On page nineteen, the ant form on the left stands on its own and in isolation
attracts the viewer's attention. The figure is undoubtedly connected to the rest of the textual
image in that the ant's shape is repeated in a clustering motif of ant shapes in various
physical positions on the right. Balancing the protagonist with a group of similar species,
inclines the viewer to feel a tension which is in psychological identification empathetic to
the emotional states of the figures conveyed. The group of ants are petrified with fright
while Effie is very much alone in a state of naive and fearful bedazzlement of the
mysterious shadowy figure which is about to descend on the hoard. The facial expressions
also convey the inner psychological and emotional state of the figures as some of the ants
are portrayed with contorted and grotesque features associated with a painful experience
and resulting emotional turmoil (e.g., fear, panic, anxiety, and isolation), whereas Effie is
comparatively complacent in expressing an open-mouthed, circular shape that connotes
breath-taking, fear, surprise and wonderment.

Directed tensions can also be created through the use of lines and linear shapes which
act as stimuli to guide the viewer's attention to a desired area. On pages sixteen and
seventeen, the reader is drawn down the path as its linear shape encased by the framing of
grass forms stands in contrast to generate interest and directional tensions which pull the
viewer down the path and into the visual field following the movement of the characters
from the foreground of the first frame to the top of the second frame. Focal points are not
essential within a pictorial plane; however, the purposeful arrangement of directional
tensions by the artist may be an attempt to vivify the viewer's aesthetic responses to the
work through controlling the energies produced within the visual frames and overall text.
In some cases, this technique is supported by the lexical anchoring or relay of the content
(see Barthes, 1964) within the visual text to that of the lexical text in order to create a total
context for the act of communication. If there are many competing focal points of interest
within the image, the resulting experience for the viewer is one of a confused and
disoriented state. Such excessive use of directional tensions could be used in illustrating a
state of chaos but is not conducive to a balanced and harmonious composition. The scene
where all the insects are running away from Effie is chaotic and causes the viewer to search
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the visual field because there is no specific focal point or consistent unity of colors upon
which to fixate an ocular centration. Consequently, the lack of order or underlying logic in
the visual field opens the text to aberrant interpretations of the pictorial code: Has Effie
terrified the other insects to such an extent that they react with such extreme fear? The
possibility is open for miscommunication between the text and the viewer/reader based
upon inferences drawn from the previous incidents of the plot as it unfolded; therefore, the
visual text requires more lexical relaying of information in order for the viewer/reader to
interpret the message properly.

Implantation (Positioning in the Plane and Balance)

In assessing pictorial balance, the viewer mentally weighs the visual elements (color,
value, texture, line, shape, and form) on the picture plane as they are distributed across the
visual field. Desire for balance is an innate human tendency (Arnheim, 1974) and an image
in which the pictorial elements confirm imbalanced arrangements within the compositional
plane serve to cause a feeling of psychic and emotional (conscious and subconscious)
discomfort within the viewer. A n equal distribution of visual weight is a common
denominator of compositions aimed at creating a sense of harmonious arrangements.
Purposeful imbalances of the pictorial plane can be controlled and practically applied for
visual texts in which the theme aims at the attainment of a desired disquieting affect of an
uneasy response in the viewer. On page ten, Effie is depicted on the extreme left and at the
top of the visual field to the extent that the total form has been cropped to a minimum of
essential defining parts. The imbalance of the composition enhances and supports the sense
of instability, inadequacy and insecurity Effie must be feeling in not having succeeded at
finding a friend with whom to converse. In essence, the imbalance in the compositional
structure of the visual text projects the unique emotional content of the image outward to the
viewer in order to achieve the pathos, or sense of pity and fear, required for the fabula to
succeed penultimately in its resolution as a story of triumph.

Such slight imbalances can also be employed to draw viewer interest. Due to our
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intrinsic sense of gravity, visual texts which are weighted more heavily in the bottom
region of the picture plane result in a comforting sense of stability. As the arrangement of
visual weight moves up the vertical axis of the picture plane, the image increasingly evokes
a sense of dynamics and instability. Page seven of Effie depicts the butterfly
predominantly in the top left of the illustration. Although the weight of the butterfly is
balanced by the grassy region on the lower quadrant of the visual field, as the focal point
high in the picture plane the butterfly achieves a weightless grace and airiness usually
associated with the species that would have not have been conveyed to the viewer were the
subject situated in the lower half of the composition.
Symmetrical balance in which the centre axis separates two identical arrangements of
visual elements on either side of the axis is the simplest form of composition exemplifying
perfect but similarly static balance. A s a result, the mood of an image can be delineated as
austere and ordered through the symmetrical arrangements of pictorial elements. A
dignified subject would appropriately be illustrated through a symmetrical arrangement so
as to emphasize personality and identity traits by way of the psychological impressions
achieved through compositional arrangements. The elephant on page twenty-four is
depicted in near symmetrical arrangement to convey to the viewer a dimension of the
elephant's persona as dignified and stately. The character traits endowed the elephant are
also supported by the viewpoint from which the viewer is allowed to see the subject,
looking up at it, which functions to emphasize the overwhelming stature and magnitude of
the animal so as to promote the illusion of size and significance.

Asymmetrical balance is achieved when dissimilar objects are arranged in the visual
field in order to attain balance of the visual field. This form of balance is less static in
contributing to infuse the visual field with tensions and movement. On pages sixteen and
seventeen, a vertical composition presents us with a variety of asymmetrically arranged
pictorial elements. The large, dark, simple shape of Effie which draws our attention is
balanced by an intricate arrangement of smaller shapes culminating in a mound of yellow
sand on the far right side of page seventeen which attracts the eye and proves to complete
the necessary weight to achieve visual balance of the vertically oriented visual field.
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Color can also function to achieve balance within a pictorial plane. A large area of low
intensity color and values can be balanced by a small area of high intensity color and value.
On page twenty-five, the large, grey elephant's head in the upper left quadrant is balanced
by a small, brightly colored yellow quarter-circle which opens in the expanse of grass for
the ants to cluster together. The large, dull grey area is counterbalanced asymmetrically by
the yellow area. Brighter and more intense colors are visually heavier and can therefore be
used to balance larger light areas. It should also be noted that large simple shapes can be
balanced by smaller more complex ones. The simple shapes of the elephant's head and eye
on pages twenty-six and twenty-seven are balanced by Effie's intricate arrangement of
body shapes and angles.
Asymmetrical balance can also be achieved through placing heavier dominant shapes or
colors closer to the center while situating the visually lighter and less dominant objects
toward the outer edges of the picture plane. Such balance create for dynamism within the
viewer's experience of the image because at first it alludes to imbalance before equalizing
the visual weight. On page thirty, Effie is situated left of center as a dark figure being
visually counterbalanced by the placement of an isolated tree running off the edge of the
picture plane. The directional tension between the two focal points because of the dark
values used to depict the subject causes the viewer to follow the line of visual forms from
Effie to the tree and eventually into the background. It must be acknowledged that rarely do
visual balancing arrangement techniques work in isolation. Illustrations generally employ
several methods within the visual field to achieve the type of balance and visual dynamics
conducive to creating a desired psychological and emotional attitude within the viewer.

Visual Anaphoric/Deictic Extensions: A Possible Visual World

Viewed in totality, a visual text is a supersyntagm made up of supersigns composed of

smaller pictorial structures of signification and is, in a "global" sense, quite different from
the plastic and perceptual variables which constitute the work syntactically and semantically
from the viewer's perspective (Eco, 1976; Saint-Martin; 1987 Prieto, 1966; Arnheim,
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1974). The mind must grasp the whole work of art and internalize the visual experience
before the senses can react to the individualized parts and general features which may then
be conceptualized through recourse to language. The eye/brain does not initially
differentiate each of the individual components of a visual image but instead it will organize
the components into a more comprehensible and unified whole. Arnheim (1974) explains
the wholeness of human perceptions that constitutes the Gestalt theory of visual text,

If one wishes to be admitted to the presence of a work of art, one must, first of all,
face it as a whole. What is it that comes across? What is the mood of the colors,
the dynamics of the shapes? Before we identify any one element, the total
composition makes a statement that we must not lose. We look for a theme, a key
to which everything relates. If there is a subject matter we learn as much about it as
we can, for nothing an artist puts into his work can be regarded with impunity.
Safely guided by the structure of the whole, we then try to recognize the principle
features and explore their dominion over dependent details. Gradually, the entire
wealth of work reveals itself and falls into place and as we perceive it correctly, it
begins to engage all the powers of the mind with its message, (p.8)

It is this intrinsic wholeness of a visual text in relation to the nature of human perception
which places limits upon and interferes with semiotic analysis. Yet, in attempting to
understand a visual text by furnishing cognitive and affective, conscious and subconscious,
hypotheses for an analytical approach to larger aggregates of coloremes, it is necessary on
the part of the viewer to perform visual semantic disclosures based upon the syntactic
structure of the visual text as a composite supersyntagm. On one level, the syntactic
structure of a visual text is composed of differences in color the properties of which are the
result of and subject to particular laws of color (as discussed earlier). On another level, the
agglomeration of color within a pictorial plane from the chromatic formlessness of dots and
lines to create shapes which take on specific forms and dimensions engender the visual text
with semantic meaning potential only outwardly expressible through recourse to language.

The recognition of form as the main principle of correlation between visual elements
(color, value, texture, line, shape, form) constituting a pictorial text is the result of gestalt
regroupings or disjunctions within a visual field. Once the dimensions of form(s) are
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identified, lexically as well as pictorially, the underlying logic of organization within the
pictorial plane becomes apparent through subjective gestaltian approximations made by the
viewer to determine the spatialization of forms and their interrelations within the visual text
which engender a possible visual world. The major criterion for the evaluation of form is
vraisemblance, or a direct visual correspondence to reality, where the viewer's experience
of naturalistic forms in the real world is necessarily the determinant for recognition. One
cannot identify linguistically and cognitively assimilate a form which is not familiar to one's
own visual experience (see Arnheim, 1969). Therefore, the figuritivization of shape into
form is textually determined by the capacity of the viewer to identify the resemblance of a
pictorial shape to a referent, or predesignated and already accommodated form, in external
reality and the extent to which the resemblance holds true determines the success of the
figuritivization for the purposes of communication between the viewer and the visual text.

The basic schema of an ant identified in Effie is anatomically accurate to the point where
the viewer can confidently state that some of the zoomorphic forms depicted in the picture
book are indeed ants, or creatures with a three-part segmented body structure, black, red or
brown in color, possessing six appendages and a single set of antennae, while others are
not. There are, however, inconsistencies between ant forms found in the external world
and ant forms depicted within the internalized visual paradigm of the text that must be
reconciled before the viewer can accept the "truthfulness" of the possible visual world of
Effie and suspend disbelief fully. It is true, however, that all artistic representations of
reality are in fact abstractions of reality to some degree because of non-reconcilable
perceptual variables that affect and determine the external portrayal of form in relation to its
mental interprétant. To some extent, the viewer's eidetic memory intrudes upon the visual
perception of forms by providing what is depicted with properties defined in terms of the
vestigial remains of the viewer's previous experiences with the form in the real world. The
viewer subconsciously fills in any gaps between the stylized image and the real-life referent
in order to assimilate and accommodate the new visual experience within the ready-made
schemata of an encyclopaedic visual knowledge (Eco, 1979; Arnheim, 1974); however, the
responses resulting from subconscious processes of visual understanding are much more
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difficult to determine and it is not possible to generalize what the particularized networks of
visual associations for an individual might be without basing the analysis in the specific
realm of a viewer's experience.
Despite natural differences, the ants, and indeed all the zoomorphic forms in the picture
book, are anthropomorphized in physical and intellectual capabilities to the extent that the
occurential and cognitive doings of the visual actors exhibited in the text by the artist
deviate radically from what is feasibly expected from these animal types in real world
terms. For example, all the zoomorphic forms represented in the picture book have the
power of speech and possess psychological and emotional complexity of will manifest as
needs, wants and desires which are depicted in the visual text through the characters' facial
expression and actions. These are the correlatives of non-verbalized forms of somatic and
psychic consciousness objectified in the text as visual metaphorical structures from which
the viewer draws inferences to realize the cognitive and occurential dimensions of doing
performed by the subjects depicted in the linear visual narrative. The lexical text, in turn,
reinforces and extends the visual portrayal of the characters by offering the verbalized
equivalents of actorial consciousness in the form of dialogic discourse (see Bakhtin,
1981). It is this disjunction between "the real" and "the fictional" that the viewer must
address through extensional responses: first, on the level of visual anaphorical/deictic
extensions in order to permit or to reject the thematization of various aspects of physical
behavior and psychological or emotional demeanor exhibited by the subjects in the linear
visual narrative and, second, on the level of visual indexes where cross-medial frames of
reference are set up by the viewer's macropropositions in order to determine the extent of
contiguity between the lexical and visual possible worlds established in the text. The
process of aesthetic encoding and the means of decoding must be clearly identified by the
viewer in order to verify abductions which visual semantic disclosures generate in the form
of "frame-by-frame" micropropositions during the act of visual meaning making. It is not
by chance that as a consequence of anthropomorphic stylization in the visual text, some of
the zoomorphic forms in Effie also wear clothing and other apparel which accentuates the
characteristic features of their species in order to amplify the comic portrayal according to
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one or more aspect of the common visual frames of reference afforded the viewer (e.g., the
caterpillar wears multiple pairs of sandals and the butterfly wears a ballet outfit to float
through the air). This visual trope based upon hyperbole, or exaggeration, and is used to
inspire the cognitive and affective responses in the viewer leading to humor. Yet, it is
because the most obvious facets of the subjects' physical structures are transformed in the
fictional representations that the viewer is alerted to the recodification of real world forms in
terms of conventions established specifically by intervisual paradigms drawn from the
genre of fable where textual world structures, already determined by the possible world of
the text, facilitate the aesthetic purposes of communication. Since the suspension of
disbelief is to some extent dependent upon a knowledge of existing visual conventions
which are the product of previous experience of texts (e.g., genre), the ability of the viewer
to access intervisual frames of reference as the basis for either accepting or rejecting the
possible visual world depicted in the text is a determinate of his/her aesthetic cooperation in
acknowledging the fictional construct being developed.

If the viewer can identify the network of relations governing manifest elements in the
pictorial text which define the functions of forms as visual actors in spatially determined
roles governed by temporal sequences, then the visual plot can be realized linearly as a
continuous pictorialized narrative of characters, actions and events. Later, on the thematic
level, the visual fabula can then be abstracted as propositions which actualize the artist's
purpose of communication. The viewer's basis for judgment then becomes the internal
self-consistency and the logic of the possible visual world portrayed in the pictorial text as a
familiar fictional archetype and not the verisimilitude of the forms, the actions or the events
in the sequences composing the linear visual narrative.

Visual Metaphorical Structures: Cross-medial Agreement

Once the denotative aspect of identifying and lexically naming the specific forms that
are depicted in the visual field has been achieved through figurativization, the most
fundamental semantic level of visual communication between the pictorial text and the
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viewer has transpired and the connotative aspects of the representation can, therefore, be
built upon the viewer's literal conception of the forms through definitional and stylistic
variations. The depiction of the caterpillar on page five of Effie is an example of how
possible initial abductions regarding the genre of the picture book may be confirmed in
accordance with the progression of the linear visual narrative because the viewer has been
prepared for the anthropomorphization of the caterpillar by the like presentation of the ants.
There are no real world zoomorphic forms with human tendencies of the type depicted in
the possible visual world of the picture book; however, the viewer must be persuaded to
maintain the suspension of disbelief required in order to accept the pictorial tropes used by
the artist to portray the subjects anthropomorphically for the aesthetic and thematic
purposes of the work to succeed as "visually truthful" text. In the case of Effie, if the
viewer has not realized the first steps leading from the micropropositions drawn from
inferences in relation to specific visual frames depicting the spatialization of forms toward
the macropositions of the visual fabula resulting from the portrayal of the action as events
within a linear visual narrative, then the thematic significance of the visual plot cannot be
abstracted from the presentation of actorial doing, both cognitive and occurential, in the
pictorial text. This important phase of meaning-making begins from the recognition of the
thematic function of form (see Arnheim, 1974).

The rejection of the possible visual world is the result of the inability of the viewer to
comprehend the underlying logic of elementary structures of visual signification
constructed from the relations and transformations of elements comprising the pictorial text
and based upon spatialization between forms as visual actants which derive and constitute
those structures, or fundamental visual syntax. It is obvious in the first four pages of Effie
(identified as N S I in the lexical text) that the protagonist maintains a relation of
conjunction and disjunction to the other ants which is determined on the levels of somatic
resemblances, psychological empathy between visual actors and social position in the
possible visual world. The conjunction is delineated strictly through spatialization (see
Arnheim, 1969) by the protagonist's dutious role in the regimented routine of the
cumulative population of ant forms in long lines during the performance of laborious tasks.
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The disjunction becomes apparent in the representation of Effie relative to the similar ant
prototypes which appear, in the text, to be suspended in varying states of animation over
three consecutive visual frames to suggest an elapsed time. The cross-medial agreements
between visual and lexical texts support these conjunctions and disjunctions by stylistically
overcoding the points of similarity and contrast that are the most thematically relevant. The
viewer at this stage has already performed the necessary visual semantic disclosures
required to amplify or suppress the latent properties of form which distinguish the
protagonist from the rest of the ants and the visual topic is then pictorially identified as
being based upon a disjunctive physiognomic relation: the shape and size of Effie's mouth
relative to the same feature presented in the other ants. In essence, the bigger mouth is a
visual metaphorical structure representing greater vocal power which, in turn, reinforces
the disjunction between the visual actors and isolates it pictorially as the topic for the source
of discontent to all the other zoomorphic forms in the beginning of NSI in NP1. Also, the
lack of physical elaboration in the portrayal of the ants virtually guarantees that the viewer
will interpret the image of the mouth as thematically important to the visual text because of
the absence of pictorial clues to the contrary. Therefore, this particular feature characterizes
the visual representation of the protagonist in relation to the other zoomorphic forms and is
thematized with respect to the outcome of the linear visual narrative.

Ultimately, the viewer becomes aware of how the pictorial text is structured actantially
and if it is in agreement with the actantial structures of the lexical text. It is not possible for
the artist to produce the homogeneity of negative reaction required from the zoomorphic
forms toward Effie for the resolution of the visual fabula to be effective without isolating
the underlying reason for the overwhelmingly pejorative response and assigning specific
thematic functions to the visual actors comprising the action of events in terms of cognitive
and occurential doing. We can see that Effie possesses a substantially bigger mouth but the
facial expression can suggest a number of possible interpretations such as excitement,
happiness or even naivete which are contrary to the dysphoric connotation developed
through the lexical text. Without recourse to cross-medial agreements between the lexical
and the visual texts, there can be no way to elaborate upon the thematic significance of the
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physiognomic differences perceived between Effie and the other ants which give rise to
visual actantial roles in the modality of predicated actions and events represented within the
pictorial text. To enhance the visual metaphorical potential of the expression /Effie's voice
was like thunder/ (p. 3), the superior physical trait of the protagonist is manifest in the
physical feature of a larger mouth to accommodate the viewer with a symbolic equivalent or
visible referent to the louder voice and to pictorially identify the associative logic of a
comparison deemed feasible only within the possible world of the text (e.g., the wider
Effie opens her mouth, the louder her voice then becomes). The correlation is strictly
associative and non-rational because the larger mouth is symbolic in representing
something outside of itself and does so in accordance with the aesthetic conventions of the
text which determine how the encoding of pictorial elements is accomplished through the
isotopy delineated in the lexical text and incorporated into the metaphorical structures of the
visual text (Eco, 1976). In reality there is no physiological basis for the correlation but the
visual symbol, or visual metaphor structure, works to join the two disparate semic axes,
size of mouth and loudness of voice, in order to create the illusion of a correlation for the
viewer and guide macropropositions of the fabula. This is an example of the type of cross-
medial agreement which comes to dominate the pictorial text of Effie as visual stylistic
overcoding for the purpose of identifying and developing the distinctive personality traits of
the characters which define their functions in the visual actantial structures of the picture
book. If we seek an explanation as to why an ant would wear shoes or walk upright, a
satisfying answer to the problem must contain specific reference to the logic inherent to the
visual and lexical structures underlying the possible world developed in the text. The
stylized depiction of the actors cannot be taken literally, but only figuratively, as visual
metaphorical structures which build a mood or tone upon which the textual level operates
openly in association with the viewer's intensional and extensional responses to achieve the
cognitive, affective and aesthetic responses that focus and realize the purpose of
communication.

This process of visual encoding is derived from what Gombrich (1960) defines as
"Toffer's Law", where expression may transform any shape into the semblance of a being
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endowed with life, identity and a living presence. Gombrich (1960) explains the
justification for an abbreviatory style of pictorial narrativity as follows:

One thing only is needed for the pictorial narrator—a knowledge of physiognomies
and human expression. After all, he must create a convincing hero and characterize
people he comes into contact with: he must convey their reaction and let the story
unfold in terms of readable expressions, (p. 339)

The interpretation of psychic and emotional states of consciousness in a visual subject are
connected to synaesthetic judgments made by the viewer resulting from an empathy with
the external expression and manifestation of internalized states of being, like anger or
shame, that are observable in the visible constitution of its physiognomy. The basis for the
conclusions drawn from any like abductions is visual experience since the projection of the
viewer's synaesthetic feelings allows for empathy which is ultimately derived from real
world experience or knowledge of other visual examples. The information received from
the visual representation of inner states of being through physiognomy allows the viewer to
abduce macropropositions through a series of inferences in a particular situation which aid
in the construction of the visual fabula. For example, when the pigs fly on the last page of
Tuesday (Weisner, 1991), the viewer is hardly as surprised as the pigs themselves who are
undergoing the surreal psychic experience of defying the natural physical capabilities
endowed them by nature. This is because the linear visual narrative has come full circle to
parallel the beginning of what may well be a recurrent phenomenon and the viewer is
invited to imaginatively complete the cycle of events in conjunction with the original visual
plot by mentally substituting the pigs for the frogs in the supersyntagm of the linear visual
narrative. The range of psychic and emotional states experienced by the subjects can be
read through the various facial expressions and physical gestures exhibited. The pig figure
in the upper left hand corner is left wide-eyed and open-mouthed to connote a sense of awe
and fear which is paralleled in the form by the spread-legged stance adopted, as if searching
for a place to touch firmly down. Yet, the pig figure between the direction markers
pointing north-east is utterly comfortable and sated with the experience of flying as is
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connoted through the closed eyes, the drawn smile, the pulled-back ears and the more
naturally relaxed stance. This technique of conveying thematic information visually
through the physiognomic expressions and physical gestures of the subjects is particularly
effective in picture books that contain little or no lexical text because the pictorial text can be
brief without needing recourse to language in order to clarify the method of encoding
embodied within the linear visual narrative plot beyond what the viewer actually needs to
decode it on the level of fabula. In this sense, a picture book like Tuesday (Weisner, 1991)
is more open to multiple interpretations than a picture book like Effie because the visual
text is not anchored to a particular context of meaning making where the purpose of
communication is developed in close relation to the relaying of information from the lexical
text, without which, the viewer would be unable to disambiguate and understand the visual
narrative sequence (see Barthes, 1964). In this respect, Effie as a total text is "closed" or
guides the viewer/reader to an foregone thematic purpose or moral lesson in the conclusion.

Visual Indexes: Within and Without Culture

Two types of visual indexes serve to limit and define the viewer's intensional and
extensional responses: 1) a syntagmatic index which enables the juxtaposition of elements
within a visual text and 2) a paradigmatic index which allows for the assimilation of visual
elements of form to a series outside the text in culture. By providing cross-medial frames
of reference that contextually link the visual and lexical codes and subcodes in the text, the
visual text parallels the lexical text in that it also generates the circumstances for its
production and reception in the model viewer, or a viewer who is in essence a mythical
construct of the artist (see Arnheim, 1988; Eco, 1979) because no real-life viewer can
apprehend totally the intensional and extensional structure of a pictorial text. The visual
text of Effie promotes a stylized depiction of naturalistic forms (e.g., ants, caterpillar,
butterfly, grasshopper, etc.) and sets up the means and standards by which to decode the
pictorial elements as actors, sequences of events and linear visual narrative relative to the
purpose of communication: in broad terms, to divert and instruct the reader. In this way,
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the visual text is structurally centripetal, or inward turning and self-supportive in its
construction because the possible visual world depicted does not have any relation to or
validity for the real world (which is necessarily outside itself) and is thematically
centrifugal, or outward reaching in its purpose, because of the intended implications of the
allegorical message with respect to the human condition (see Frye, 1957; Bakhtin, 1981).
It is not necessary for the viewer to move beyond the visual text to look for clues to the
sources of thematic meaning within external reality since it is possible to use selections
from internal visual paradigmatic indexes drawing upon the juxtaposition of visual elements
within the pictorial text to read the visual linear narrative and to abduce the visual fabula in
terms of a composite series of actions performed by visual actors. Then, if necessary, the
viewer can move between intratextual and extratextual visual paradigmatic indexes to
abstract the visual fabula and derive thematic meaning.
In The eleventh hour: A curious mystery (Base, 1989), there is a deliberate crossing-
up of external visual paradigms, as accessed by references to real world referents, in order
to create the internalized visual paradigms of zoomorphic forms upon which the picture
book relies to achieve its expressive purpose of attempting deliberately to confuse and fool
the viewer through the circumstances of its production in a complex coded structure.
Especially since the text openly alludes to the "curious mystery" which focuses thematic
objectives in the aim of communication around the viewer/reader's powers of observation,
detection and abduction (see Eco, 1979). Consequently, it is of no surprise that there are
no real focal points in the sequence of tightly compressed visual frames presented in this
picture book which may aid the viewer's search for information required to break the
mysterious code. The viewer is constantly searching for a lull in the overload of visual
stimuli carrying information to be processed by the eye/brain. This enables the artist to
overcode the visual text with so much stylistic variation in the formal arrangement of
pictorial elements that it is virtually useless in providing the viewer with a single code from
which to derive clues to construct meaning. The viewer must then rely upon the interplay
of the visual and lexical texts to relay the necessary information component so as to provide
a guide to the overall code and process of decoding which is also embodied deeply within
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the structure of the visual text, yet hidden until the key code is extracted through abductions
or the instructions of the author/artist.
The masquerade and mystery theme outlined in the lexical text allows the artist to
develop the disguise motif pictorially whereby the animals are perceived not only as
familiar zoomorphic forms according to external visual paradigms drawn from references to
such forms through the lexemes, but also as fictional alter-egos which establish internal
visual paradigms that function as indexes for gauging cross-medial agreement. The
zoomorphic forms are characterized internally in the visual text by joining an aspect of the
animals' real-life "value" (e.g., physical properties, derivation, historical, cultural
importance, etc.) with the costuming required to facilitate the masquerade theme in order to
create the internal visual paradigm which will support the semantic implications of the
lexical text and repress miscommunication while generating processes of code-making
through the viewer/reader's abduction. The success or failure of the purpose of
communication in this picture book depends upon its ability to be open to multiple
interpretations (a great deal of which will be erroneous due to the need for trial-and-error
methods of detection, analysis and deduction). For example, Sam, the crocodile, is
masquerading as a judge and wears the traditional wig, cape and three-piece suit, complete
with pocket watch, associated with the external paradigmatic conception of what a "judge"
should look like. The viewer may ask a simple question, "Why is the crocodile dressed as
a judge?" A possible symbolic reading of the visual image in thematic terms could be as
follows but this is determined by an individual's encyclopaedic knowledge and ability to
contextualize semantic selections within the possible world of the text.

On the surface, the pairing of the external visual paradigm of "the judge" with the
pictorial representation of the crocodile form is incommensurate; however, the crocodile
has been traditionally associated with wisdom or evil in western culture deriving from its
resemblance to the serpent or dragon as the symbol of knowledge before the fall of man.
The thematic aspect of the crocodile's symbolic function is never really actualized in the
visual text and it does not need to be in this case because of the mystery and masquerade
theme which leaves the text open to multiple and contradictory interpretations. It could be
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argued, however, that this is an underlying feature of the logic of characterization for all the
zoomorphic forms depicted, though the viewer would be hard-pressed to analyze and
justify some of the more obscure connections because the encoding of the visual text is
openly associational and not totally rational. By accessing external visual paradigms as
developed in relation to the concepts evoked in the lexical text, the crocodile is then
presented for the viewer as a unique, internal, visual paradigm able to stand on its own
because the means and purpose of anthropomorphization depicted in the creature comply
with the possible visual world of the picture book and the genres of fable and mystery.
Similarly, the depiction of characters in Effie functions to accentuate the commoedic
aspects of the possible world being developed in association with the lexical text and to
establish internalized visual paradigms which work as indexes to focus the viewer's
extensional responses, or what Barthes (1964) has termed, anchoring the message of the
visual text. For example, the overwhelming blueness of the spotted caterpillar, the multiple
pairs of sandals, the tufts of hair that bristle out angularly from the creature's head and chin
and the drowsy facial expression suggest a relaxedness of manner that is reminiscent of
"beatnik" culture. The next visual frame undercuts the given impression of the caterpillar
by contorting the features of the subject in order to reveal the startling power and affect of
Effie's voice referred to explicitly in the lexical narrative. The caption which reads /But she
was talking to thin air. The caterpillar nearly split his skin in his hurry to escape/ (p. 6)
reinforces the visual metaphorical structure developed in the picture book by providing the
relational isotopy through which the pictorial text is indexed in relation to the lexical text
and understood at the level of both lexical and visual fabuli in conjunction with the viewer's
reactions to the connotations of the image presented, especially since there are no other
principle closed forms in the visual frame upon which the viewer may rely. The lexical
allusion to /air/ is represented visually as a puff of air released forcefully from the bulging
caterpillar. The swelling of the eyes and cheeks connotes the impression of tightness
which refers directly to the lexical metaphor /nearly split his skin/ because it denotes in
figurative literary terms the rush in which the caterpillar wanted to escape from the source
of the irritation, objectified in the previous visual frame, in the form of the protagonist who
 109

has taken on the visual actantial role of the searcher. This type of cause-effect implication
in the pictorial representation defines the mode of presentation in the sequencing of
character actions and events which comprise the linear visual narrative in the picture book.
It is an effective means of smoothing over any of the possible disjunctions created through
the segmenting of visual plot into frames which could affect the communication between
the viewer and the pictorial text. Therefore, the interaction between the lexical and the
visual texts facilitates the means for explaining the thematic implications of the mental
concepts evoked by the lexical and visual images presented in both literal and figurative
terms. This is achieved in this instance by the viewer drawing first upon the internal visual
paradigm of the caterpillar acting as a visual index and, in turn, eliciting information from
the external visual paradigm of "the beatnik" (or any other similar external paradigm) to
make cognitive and affective associational judgements that will guide meaning making.
Intertextual knowledge of caterpillars in general and of the nature of the psychic and
emotional state connoted by the expression of the subject enables the viewer/reader to
decode the phrase /split his skin/ both literally and figuratively in conjunction with the total
text. A caterpillar does indeed /split his skin/ in the transformation from one physical state
of existence to another, a butterfly, but the operative topic presented in the lexical text is
that of /escape/. Effie must be the cause of discontent, always acting upon unsuspecting
others with the same results, before the transformation from villain to heroine can occur.

Visual Ideological Structures in Actantial Structures

Even though the focal awareness of the viewer shifts from primary to secondary areas
within the visual field, to comprehend the pictorial text on deeper levels of intension
depends upon identifying the logic of relationships between the major forms figurativized
in the pictorial plane, as visual actors, with specific functions in visual actantial structures
to motivate thematic concerns in the linear visual narrative at the level of fabula. The
succession of visual frames in a picture book predicates the action in this way by showing
the progression of the plot temporally in terms of visual actantial structures in the pictorial
 110

text which may or may not correspond to the actantial structures presented in the lexical
text. A "frame-by-frame" examination of cross-medial agreement reveals the extent of
synchronicity in the modalization of actantial structures on both textual levels and results in
the concretization of actorial roles within the linear based narratives. For example, it has
been established that the story of Effie is told in the lexical text through the sequencing of
the protagonist's actions from an implied past to an implied present. The pictorial text
functions to embellish the allusion of historical reality necessary for the fabula to be
accepted as tenable as well as identifying the principal visual actants within the syntagmatic
structure of the linear visual narrative related over twenty-seven frames as it is derived from
the narrative structure of the lexical text. The visual text then indeed elaborates upon the
lexical text by pictorially isolating the actantial and thematic roles of the lexical actants
(subjects/objects) in the narrative structures by objectifying their cognitive and occurential
doings in terms of searcher vs. escapee, communicator vs. denigrator, in visual actantial
structures which suppress misinterpretation of the lexical text on the level of fabula. In this
way, the visual ideological structures aid in establishing textual truth by confirming the
elementary ideological structures promulgated in the lexical text. The visual portrayal of
lexical actants reveals not only the non-verbalized dimensions of occurential actions but
also shows the cognitive dimensions of those actions which infuse the text with additional
levels of psychological and emotional levels of complexity that can be ascertained by the
viewer through the physiognomy of the pictorial forms and promotes further
macropropositions on the level of fabula. This is evident in Effie where the progression of
the linear visual narrative is a paralleled series of failed attempts at communication on the
part of the main visual and lexical actant in the text. As the situation becomes worse
because the object of the search has not been attained (e.g., someone to talk with) despite
the will-to-do being present in the visual actor, the psychological and emotional state of the
protagonist is made visually apparent on page twelve in the form of a facial expression
which connotes despair and grief. The protagonist now becomes the object of pity through
which an emotional identification on the part of the viewer is achieved as endearment for
the suffering of an individual who is less than adequate compared to other individuals in the
 111

possible world of the text and, therefore, anti-heroic in a thematic sense (see Frye, 1957).
It is because the visual narrative program presents situations closely aligned to the narrative
program in the lexical text, where the repeated failures of the protagonist create specific
thematic roles stemming from the narrative functions of actors (e.g., villain vs. hero, exile
vs. friend) with respect to occurential and cognitive doings, that the viewer/reader is
capable of summing up the visual and lexical narrative as a series of interrelated lexical and
visual actantial structures that are revealed in the modality of predication according to
subjects as objectified in both the lexical and visual texts. The lexical narrative of Effie is
sparse in descriptive vocabulary and lacks the adjectives necessary to characterize, in full,
the cognitive and occurential relations between actors; hence, the visual text builds upon the
limitations of signifying potential within the lexical text by describing with greater detail
what lexemes such as /ant/, /elephant/ and /beetle/ are verbal representatives of within the
textual world structures of the picture book and delineates specific visual actantial roles and
thematic roles for each form of being in the text in relation to the protagonist who controls
the lexical and visual narrative programs by virtue of being the main subject of both textual
levels. This is an important consideration for picture books that are constricted to
containing vocabulary and visual imagery which developing readers will need to
comprehend both syntactically and semantically within structures of lexical and visual
forms of signification. Quite simply, it takes many more words to describe an ant and its
actions rather than to portray one visually (see Eco, 1984; Arnheim, 1974) and this self-
evident fact will ease the decoding difficulties experienced by the young reader/viewer
when first exposed to a lexical or visual system of signification. The actantial structures of
the visual text unfold the fabula neatly by presenting a pictorial indexicality, or context, for
understanding the lexical text in terms of visual world structures that work as generative or
repressive cross-medial indicators to verify or refute the abductions, or micropropositions
and macropropositions made by the "viewer" as "reader" during the process of decoding
the lexical text. In virtually all picture books, the visual text enhances and extends the
lexical text by relaying information that redefines the semantic potential of the lexemes in a
syntagmatic chain (see Lewis, 1990).
 112

Aspects of Visual Veridiction

There is no need for the visual text to overtly justify the means and purpose of its
creation because the viewer, by this stage, has either already suspended disbelief and
accepted the incongruity of formal structures between the world of reality and the possible
world of fiction, or has rejected the aesthetic function of the text by applying external visual
paradigms as common visual frames of reference to the non-realistic but internal visual
paradigms constructed in the picture book. The logic of the depiction of the characters, the
actions and the events in an artistic text is internally self-consistent because the syntactic
relations between pictorial elements which engender the work with meaning potential are
based upon the thematic function of form according to purpose in structure and not a
validity determined by the extent of a work's adherence to external paradigms. Visual
veridiction is achieved when contiguity, or the degree of congruity displayed between both
lexical and visual texts in terms of visual truth matrixes generated cross-medially and
applicable to the possible visual world as represented in the text, is ascertained by the
viewer/reader in the form of propositions.

Since Effie contains a stylistically animated and representational visual text, the literary
genre of fable is concretely identified in the possible visual world of the picture book and a
series of expectations are created within the viewer/reader with respect to the textual world
structures of allegory to be developed through the linear visual narrative and later to be
actualized in the form of micropropositions and macropropositions that constitute the level
of visual fabula. A frame can be said to fit sequentially into the linear visual narrative from
which the visual fabula is abstracted and veridict the lexical text through a contiguity
derived from corroborating 'textual truths' established in the possible world of the text
(e.g., «Effie is a lonely créature», etc.). For example, in the frame on page thirteen of
Effie, the distinct separation of forms representing tree roots, grassy plants and leaves of
the natural landscape into a clearing reveals the structural insignificance of the protagonist
as the overshadowed pictorial center and emphasizes the emotional low point of the visual
narrative by creating a psychological empathy for the character within the viewer to
 113

promote the feeling of isolation through the centric perspective. The top-down depiction of
the ant in the center of the visual frame creates the impression of distance and the illusion of
space and depth through the arrangement of formal elements. The aerial viewpoint gives an
amplified perspective of the ant's body, where the head and mouth are disproportionately
larger than the rest of the thorax, which recedes in segments down and away from the
viewer, to emphasize the downward angular projection of vision. The tops of the leaf-like
forms are shown in order to reinforce the unusual viewpoint and to create effectively the
illusion of a third-dimension while suppressing fact that the visual text is really a two-
dimensional plane. The superimposition of one form upon another also promotes depth
perception and a sense of separateness due to the creation of different spatial planes in the
front, middle and back of the visual field. It is the configuration and organization of plant
forms acting as vectors, or pointing fingers, which captures and directs the gaze of the
viewer toward the clearing in the central area of the pictorial plane where the figure is
completely isolated (see Eco, 1976; Arnheim, 1988). Since the directional forces
represented in the pictorial plane are defined primarily by spatialization, the center, which
serves as the natural point of reference for the viewer (Arnheim, 1988), characterizes the
tensions present within the visual field in relation to the direction, shape size and location of
the forms depicted in a work. In this way, the spatial orientation within the visual frame
relies upon the viewer's sense of kinaesthetic associations (Arnheim, 1988; 1974), or the
ability to vicariously experience the simulation of gravitational pulls, in order to establish
tensions and relations between forms that determine the structure of the possible visual
world as a veridiction of the lexical text. Emotional content is also conveyed through the
structuring of the other formal elements, such as color, or value, and texture, in the visual
frame. For example, the color contrasts reinforce the fragile emotional state of the
protagonist and accentuate the mood of vulnerability which is represented visually by the
use of softer analogous colors in the center surrounded by the seemingly hostile fecundity
and burgeoning overgrowth of the raw green environment. A similar psychological and
emotional state is conveyed pictorially through darker and more textured hues near the
beginning of the picture book before NP1, as supported by both the lexical and visual
 114

texts, has fully progressed toward the psychic and somatic isolation of the protagonist
within the possible visual world portrayed. The use of color and texture on page eight is
primarily symbolic in directing and focusing the viewer's extensional responses to the
darker and more primitive aspects of the possible visual world of the picture book by
creating diagonal tensions across the dense pictorial plane from Effie's red tongue at the
center to the light values of the fallen butterfly in the upper left corner and the luminosity of
the squiggled yellow line in the lower right corner. The dominant diagonal separation
increases the dynamics of the scene and ties the two opposite corners of the frame together
to freeze the scene at a moment of high emotional tension where the protagonist is acting
out the verbalized and non-verbalized physical manifestations of profoundly distraught
internal sensibilities in the possible world of the text.
Ultimately, the theme of isolation in Effie is serious while the treatment of the theme is
comic; thus, the lack of total cross-medial agreement disjoints visual veridiction on the level
of plot and creates the potential counterpoint for a non-comic but tragic resolution. In
essence, the visual text embodies a series of violent slapstick motifs, or "calamity", like
slipping on a banana peel and falling down a flight of stairs, which the protagonist quite
unintentionally instigates and does not even notice. There are no injured parties, which in
itself is not a real world expectation, but a facet of the familiar comic convention employed
in the picture book to deflate the seriousness of the situation on the level of fabula. We pity
the protagonist and fear the adverse circumstances which are endured because the events
depicted follow the progression of the linear visual narrative through a series of core
archetypes functioning as narrative invariants representative of the human condition: the
desire for friendship, recognition, acceptance and love (see Appendix D).

Summary

Chapter Five contains an application of the method for the semiotic analysis of the
picture book (outlined in Chapter Three) to the linear visual texts of Effie and other works
 115

representative of the genre in order to answer the research question: How does the textual
form of the picture book work, both lexically and visually, as a semiotic system of signs
and codes to create meaning? For the research purpose(s) intended by the present study (as
stated in Chapter One), the application of semiotic principles of textual analysis to linear
visual text, like lexical narrative text, elucidates how the visual signifying elements of
picture book form function as systems of signs and codes to create intensional and
extensional meaning for the viewer/reader in cognitive, affective and aesthetic domains of
understanding. By examining the picture book from a semiotic perspective according to the
method detailed in Chapter Three, we are afforded insights into the dimensions of visual
text which characterize the genre's facility for meaning-making through the interaction of
lexical and visual media that comprise the formal structure of such texts. It is this enriching
of our experience of picture books based upon the analysis of textual levels higher and
lower than the sign (Saint-Martin, 1987; Eco, 1984; Greimas, 1983) which reveals the
immensely complex nature of lexical and visual elements of textual form in a work as
actualized by the cognitive, affective and aesthetic responses of a reading/viewing
consciousness. Then, the total text is illuminated and its role in learning can be better
understood in terms of the technical and artistic merits it possesses as a literary form.
 116

CHAPTER SIX

S U M M A R Y AND CONCLUSIONS

Overview

In this chapter, the purpose, the method and the findings of the present study are
summarized. Conclusions are outlined and some recommendations for further research are
offered.

Summary

The present study supports the thesis that the textual form of the picture book, as in any
literary or visual artistic work, functions to create meaning (Kiefer, 1988; Lewis, 1990;
Landes, 1987; see also Eco, 1979; Greimas, 1983; Arnheim, 1974). The premise for the
thesis is based upon the observations of Lewis (1990), Kiefer (1988) and Landes (1987)
who identify the bifurcate nature of the picture book form to be its most unique
characteristic and express the need for a structural analysis of the textual dimensions of
representative works within the genre which would account for the meaning generating
potential of an overall text comprised of both lexical and visual systems of signification.
How does the textual form of the picture book work, both lexically and visually, as a
system of signs and codes to create meaning? In order to answer the research question
posed above , the emphasis of the present study is threefold:

1) To identify the structural aspects of lexical and visual systems of signification,

as signs and codes within the picture book which work syntactically and
semantically to create meaning.

2) To explain, in semiotic terms, the interaction between the reader and the picture
book so as to furnish pragmatic (Peirce, 1931) and theoretical explanations of
 117

the reader's (cognitive, affective and aesthetic/conscious and subconscious)

reactions for lexical and pictorial hermeneutics (or acts of interpretation).

3) To identify, explain and demonstrate the use of a method of textual analysis

designed specifically for the research problem which is applicable to the picture
book genre as a whole.

Chapter Two presents an epistemological, theoretical and methodological framework

(as derived from the theories of Eco, 1976; 1979; Greimas, 1983; Saint-Martin, 1987;
Arnheim, 1974; Barthes, 1964 and others) for the analysis of the picture book by
reviewing issues concerning lexical and visual semiotics which are relevant for the
purpose(s) study outlined above from Chapter One. A semiotic method of textual analysis
is appropriate in this case because the researcher is able: 1) to take into account levels
above and below the sign (Greimas, 1983); 2) to examine the means of signification as well
as the content of signification (see Hjelmslev, 1943); 3) to ground the analysis in the text
itself and to examine how the structures of signification are engendered "globally" in codic
terms to form systems of signification (Eco, 1979); and 4) to examine the roles of both the
sender (e.g., a text) and of the receiver (e.g., a reader/viewer) in a pragmatic act of
communication (Eco, 1976; 1979).

Chapter Three consolidates the discussion in Chapter Two by detailing a method for the
semiotic analysis of the picture book which identifies, defines and explains the levels of
semiotic interaction between the lexical and visual elements comprising the signs and codes
that engender textual form in relation to the cognitive, affective and aesthetic responses
required of, or initiated in, the reader/viewer in intensional and extensional acts of meaning-
making. The pragmatic aspects of the communicative act between the text and the
reader/viewer are embodied in the method (outlined in Chapter Three) through the semiotic
theory of Eco (1976; 1979) which addresses the cultural dimensions of signification
systems by building them into the intensional and extensional approach to textual analysis
in the form of extra-textual influences upon the circumstances of utterance (e.g.,
"Information about the sender, time and social context of the message, suppositions about
the nature of the speech act, etc.") (Eco, 1979, p. 14). Eco's (1979) model and method
 118

provide the primary sources from which the method for the semiotic analysis of the lexical
signs and codes in the picture book detailed in the present study is constructed and to which
adaptations and additions are made that also allow for the examination of visual signs and
codes manifest linearly in the text as pictorialized narrative.
Chapters Four and Five illustrate an application of the method (outlined in Chapter
Three) in a formal semiotic analysis of representative works of the genre. The textual
dimensions of both lexical and visual forms of signification embodied within the various
picture books are identified according to the structural semantics of semiotic theory
(discussed in Chapter Two). A n analysis of how the formal structuring of text functions as
a system of signs and codes to create meaning is offered so as to furnish pragmatic (Peirce,
1931) and theoretical explanations in semiotic terms for the reader/viewer's intensional and
extensional acts which lead to cognitive, affective and aesthetic responses.

Conclusions

Several important conclusions may be drawn from the study regarding how the formal
aspects of lexical and visual systems of signification embodied as signs and codes within
the textual structure of the picture book work to create meaning. The present study
demonstrates how the formal dimensions of text in the picture book work to guide the
reader/viewer through the circumstances of its lexical and visual production, or structure,
from the recognition of elements and levels below the sign (e.g., semes or coloremes) to
elements and levels above the sign (e.g., possible worlds or fabula), where meaning-
making is dependent upon the reader/viewer's ability to actualize intensionally and
extensionally motivated responses (cognitive, affective and aesthetic) according to
individualized systems of conceptual apparati based upon real world experience(s) (Eco,
1979; Greimas, 1983; Saint-Martin, 1987). In essence, the unique formal aspects of the
picture book function to engender meaning by provoking and evoking aesthetic responses
on the lexical and visual expressive planes of the text while allowing for fundamental
cognitive and affective communication to take place "globally" on the content plane. It is in
 119

the relation of lexical and visual forms that the integration takes place to imbue the work
with meaning potential.
Even so, the case of the picture book is not simply the reconciliation of the expression
of content within the lexical and visual texts of a work, but how the expression of content
leads to the creation of personal meaning for each reader/viewer. The study reveals how the
consciously motivated acts of meaning-making required of, and initiated in, the
reader/viewer to realize the signifying potential of the text (at different levels) are reconciled
with the extratextual responses achieved by the reader/viewer relative to the signifying
structures in a text but dependent upon contextual factors which influence their perception
(e.g., culture, education, "competence", etc.). The contextual influences of learned codic
systems (e.g., language or "visual language") upon individual perception and other
experiences which determine "competence" (as defined in relation to cognition of sign
structures, e.g., words, colors, etc.) are identified, explained and accounted for according
to semiotic theory and method. The dimensions of text in its linear manifestation, both
lexical and visual, as a narrative based upon the temporalization of a sequence of events
acted out by characters is revealed through the elementary structures of signification, the
primary signifying features of which (e.g., a word, a sentence, a color, a line, etc.),
convey semantic potential through syntactic construction extending over an larger narrative
structure as is shown in Chapters Four and Five. It is in this sense that a sequence of
related visual frames can be conceptualized linearly as a narrative and warrant a method of
semiotic analysis (similar to that of lexical narrative) developed especially for the purpose
of deconstructing how a linear visual narrative is structured.

In the present study, the encoding of these elementary structures of signification

through which a work achieves meaning and life as narrative is analyzed in terms of the
reader/viewer's creation of a "possible world" conceived as a construct (from individual
experience) upon which disbelief is suspended. It is true that the elementary structures of
signification engender the textual form of lexical and visual narrative structures in the
picture book (e.g., sentences, paragraphs, visual frames, etc.) but it is not in direct relation
 120

to them on a microstructural level that the reader/viewer makes abductions in the form of

macropropositions or comparative responses (e.g., forecasts and inferential walks or visual

indexes) regarding the resolution of the plot as fabula (and as an intertextual or
paradigmatic entity). Some of the reader/viewer's cognitive, affective and aesthetic
responses are clearly subconscious interpretive acts which facilitate disclosures that
generate a field of semantic potential (e.g., the seme is a postulate for this type of
reaction). The reduction of the narrative into sequences according to the interplay of actants
(e.g., subject vs. object, sender vs. receiver) which allows the thematic roles of the actors
(characters) or visual actors which govern the narrative structures of the lexical and visual
text to be revealed occurs however at the macrostructural level. The thematic roles of the
actors being acknowledged as "real" develop the ideological motivation of a given text and
predicate the action of the plot accordingly through the characters on the level of narrative
structures and elucidate the fabula. The culmination of the aesthetic experience of reading/
viewing a text is dependent upon the accessibility and the viability of the vision in relation
to the textual world structures, both lexical and visual, and the extent to which they are
aligned on the level of the fabula within the "global" possible world of the text. Through
the method for the semiotic analysis of the picture book detailed in Chapter Three, the
present study demonstrates that there is a definite self-supportive framework of cross-
medial agreement between the lexical and visual components of the text on all levels which
functions to develop the linear narrative manifestations of the plot in each codic milieu.

The progression from the possible world visions portrayed in a text to deeper real
world understandings is a matter of suspending disbelief and accepting the conventions of
the genre as applicable fabulaic alternatives for everyday life (see Kiefer, 1988). Although
it is not true in a literal sense that art is more vivid than life, the imagination reconstitutes
life through art and vivifies it as a heightened portrayal of the human condition from which
we learn more about ourselves. The picture book, by employing both visual and lexical
modes of communication, serves through cross-mediation to supply the reader with an
experience novel to the work but dependent on the world of the self.
 121

Recommendations for Further Research

Although semiotic methods of textual analysis have been little used in the study of
picture books, the findings of the present study suggest the significance of these methods
for some of the central questions in the field. In particular, semiotics could make important
contributions to understanding how the reading/viewing process influences learning and to
clarifying the potential effectiveness of picture books in learning situations, two research
concerns which thus far have been inadequately addressed (Kiefer, 1988; Landes, 1987).
Several specific recommendations for further research emerge from the findings of the
present study:
1) Because the method for the semiotic analysis of the picture book as presented in
Chapter Three has not been extensively applied to a wide range of picture books in a variety
of styles (e.g., wordless, non-representational, "pop-up", etc.), further research into the
applicability of the method constructed for the purpose(s) of this study (see Chapter One) to
other works representative of the genre is warranted.
2) The lack of extensive discussion in the present study upon cross-medial agreement
between lexical and visual systems of signification which constitute the picture book form
suggests that additional study of this aspect of the genre is warranted. Further research
might be undertaken using a wider range of picture books in a variety of styles (e.g.,
wordless, non-representational, "pop-up", etc.) in order to determine to what extent this
phenomenon is (or is not) prevalent in the genre as a defining feature.
3) Since the present study is theoretically based in developing a method for the
semiotic analysis of the picture book, empirical research assessing the extent to which the
reader/viewer actualizes the theoretical intensions and extensions in the act of meaning-
making as presented through the application of the method in Chapters Four and Five is
needed.
The specific recommendations for further research would empirically substantiate the
method for the semiotic analysis of the picture book as presented in this study.
 122

NOTES

1. Derrida (1974) speaks of the inflation of the "sign" (language) in written form and
defines all written language after "The Death of Speech" as written.

2. A l l further citations to Effie (Allison & Reid, 1990) will refer to page number only.
Also, single slashes denote a word or expression used as a sign-vehicle
(e.g., /line/), whereas, guillemets are intended to reveal the conceptual content of
the word or expression (e.g., «line»).
 123

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Appendix A

Hjelmslev"s (1943) Sign Model

Hjelmslev's stratified dyadic sign model. « . symbolizes a relation of

interdependence: content-form and expression-form are two constants which depend
mutually on one another. —. symbolizes the relation determination between a
necessary functive (the constant), which is the form of content or expression, and a
nonnecessary functive (the variable), which is the substance of content or
expression.

(Nôth, 1985, p. 67)

 Appendix B

Propp's (1928) Inventory of Functions

1. Absence
2. Interdiction
3. Violation
4 . Reconnaissance ( i n q u i r y )
5. Delivery ( i n f o r m a t i o n )
6. Fraud
7. Complicity
8. Villainy
8a. Lack
9. Mediation, the connective movement ( m a n d a t e )
10. Beginning counteraction ( h e r o ' s d e c i s i o n )
1 1 . Departure
12. Thefirstfunction of the donor ( a s s i g n m e n t o f a t e s t )
1 3 . The hero's reaction ( c o n f r o n t a t i o n o f t h e t e s t )
14. The provision, receipt of magical agent ( r e c e i p t o f t h e
helper)
15. Spatial translocation
16. Struggle
17. Marking
18. Victory
19. The initial misfortune or lack is liquidated (liquidation of
t h e lack)
20. Return
21. Pursuit, chase
22. Rescue
23. Unrecognized arrival
24. See 8a above
2 5 . The difficult task ( a s s i g n m e n t o f a t a s k )
2 6 . Solution: a task is accomplished (success)
27. Recognition
28. Exposure ( r e v e l a t i o n o f t h e t r a i t o r )
2 9 . Transfiguration: new appearance ( r e v e l a t i o n of t h e hero)
30. Punishment
3 1 . Wedding
 Appendix C

Narrative Functions in Effie

1. One of the members absents himself from home.

2. A n interdiction is addressed to the hero.

3. The interdiction is violated.

8 a. One member of the family either lacks something or desires to have something.

9. Misfortune or lack is made known: the hero is approached with a request or a

command; he is allowed to go or is dispatched.

11. The hero leaves home.

12. The hero is tested, interrogated, attacked, etc., which prepares the way for his
receiving either a magical agent or helper.

17. The hero is branded.

25. A difficult task is posed to the hero.

26. The task is resolved.

27. The hero is recognized.

Adapted from Scholes, 1975, pp. 63-

 131

Appendix D

Temporal Sequence of the Narrative

Narrative Program 1 :

Sequence I. (pp. 1-4) Indefinite past: Sl(Effie)US2 (ants).

Sequence II. /One day/: S1US3 (caterpillar) (pp. 5-6).

Sequence III. /Next minute/: S1US4 (butterfly) (pp. 7-8).

Sequence IV. Continuation: S1US5 (spider) (pp. 8-10).

Sequence V. /long time/: S1US6 (beetle) (pp. 10-11 ).

Sequence VI. /Then/: S1US7 (grasshopper) (p. 12).

Sequence VII. Intermittent: S1US2-S7 (p. 13).

Sequence VIII. Return: S1US2-S7 (pp. 14-15).

Sequence IX. Chase: S1US2-S7 (pp. 16-17).

Sequence X . Climax: SlUnS2US8 (elephant) (pp. 18-27).

Narrative Program 2:

Sequence XI. Heroic Transformation: S1DS8; S2UHS1US8 (p.28).

Sequence XII. Discovery: SlflS8;S2UnS8 (p. 29).

Sequence XIII. Harmony: SlUHS2UnS8 (p. 30).

Where: U = a relation of disjunction

H = a relation of conjunction
Ufl = a relation of compatibility