Problems With The System Of Image Textual Organisation

Martin & Rose (2007: 329, 333n):

In sum, images and layouts are organised by their left-right, top-down and centre-margin axes, and by the relative salience of their elements. … These options in textual organisation are set out in Figure 9.13. … ⁹

 

⁹ Kress and van Leeuwen’s terms Given and New derive from Halliday’s description of the linguistic system of INFORMATION (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004). We have generalised their Given-New, Ideal-Real and Centre-Margin contrasts as options in INFORMATION DISTRIBUTION. 

The term ‘salience’ is used by Kress and van Leeuwen, but the SALIENCE values of high/neutral/low are our own. 

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, this confuses the spatial dimensions of images with textual organisation: the relative textual highlighting of information in images. In doing so, it omits the depth dimension: from foreground to background, and misconstrues the centre-margin relation as an axis.

[2] To be clear, the validity of the network can be challenged on two grounds: its features and its wiring. 

With regard to its features, as previously observed, the 'horizontal' system makes the unwarranted assumption that Given always precedes New, whereas in the source model, New may precede Given, Given may be absent, or "surround" the New. 

With regard to the 'vertical' system, the features 'ideal' and 'real' are categories of ideational meaning, not categories of textual highlighting. 

With regard to the 'central' system, the centre of an image is not always the textual focus, as previously demonstrated for the case of maps. 

And with regard, to the 'SALIENCE' system, Martin & Rose have not demonstrated three levels of salience in their analyses.

With regard to the wiring of the network, it allows for the contradictory combinations of textual highlighting (New, Central) with low SALIENCE, and textual downplaying (Given, Marginal) with high SALIENCE.

[3] To be clear, this footnote at the end of the chapter acknowledges the intellectual source of the their model, and identifies their own contribution as a system name and feature scaling.