Elaborating Image-Text Relations

Martin & Rose (2007: 323, 328):

In the horizontal triptych, image-text relations are both elaborating and enhancing. The image of the boy restates the words that begin Mandela’s story, I was not born with a hunger to be free . . . It was only when I began to learn that my boyhood freedom was an illusion ... that I began to hunger for it. The analogy with the text is signalled by the weak image-text boundary, with the photo intruding into the text. In contrast, the image of the inauguration is more strongly bounded from Mandela’s story, and Mandela himself is noticeably absent from the photo, replaced by the people of South Africa under the flag of their new nation. So this image is clearly marked off from the text as distinct new information.

Blogger Comments:

[1] As previously noted, the logico-semantic relations of elaboration and enhancement do not feature in Martin's model of logical discourse semantics, conjunction, because it is a rebranding of Halliday & Hasan's (1976) model of cohesive conjunction, which was written before they had formulated the most general categories of logical relations.

[2] To be clear, this is manifestly untrue. The image is a photograph of a boy at Mandela's inauguration as President. As such, it does not restate Mandela's words about himself. This can be demonstrated by presenting the photograph to someone and asking them what it "states".

[3] To be clear, this is a bare assertion, unsupported by argument as to why a "weak image-text boundary" should represent a relation of analogy, rather than anything else, or why a "strong image-text boundary" should not represent a relation of analogy. Moreover, it is not true that the image "intrudes" into the text, since there is no overlap of image with text. Instead, the text wraps around the image, each remaining distinct from each other.

[4] To be clear, this is bare assertion, unsupported by argument as why this image-text boundary is "more strongly bounded" than the other. On the contrary, both images are unframed, and both images are separate from the texts adjacent to them. This would suggest that the image-text boundaries are the same for both images.

[5] To be clear, Mandela is absent from both photographs. The boy depicted in the left-hand photograph is not Mandela, but a member of the crowd at Mandela's inauguration as President. Accordingly, Mandela has not been replaced in the right-hand photograph.

[6] To be clear, this conclusion is not validated by the propositions that precede it; see [4] and [5].