The Horizontal Textual Organisation Of Layout: Given/New

Martin & Rose (2007: 323, 328):

In the horizontal triptych on pages 202-3, the photo of the boy is Given and that of the inauguration is New.  The photos are more salient than the texts by virtue of their colour intensity and Given-New positions, with the inauguration image by far most salient. Our eye is attracted first to this large picture, then back to the photo of the boy, and then to the texts to explain the images for us. Within the left-hand vertical triptych, the image of the boy is more salient than the marginal texts above and below him, due to its size, colour and centrality. As a result we expect these texts to expand on the meaning of the photograph, and indeed they do, with enhancement.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, Martin & Rose provide no argument here for the applicability of Halliday's information unit to images and page layout. The authors merely accept its use by Kress & van Leeuwen (1996) without question. Moreover, there is no argument for treating the unmarked sequence, Given^New, as the only possible ordering. For information units, the structure may be:

• Given^New
• Given^New^Given
• New^Given
• New

Here the left image is claimed to be Given information merely because it is positioned to the left of the other image, which is claimed to be (the focus of) New information merely because it is positioned to the right of the other image. Martin & Rose provide no argument as to why a photograph of a boy in the crowd (who is not mentioned in the text) should be Given information relative to the photograph of the flag in the same crowd. It might be argued that the new South African flag is presented as New, but Martin & Rose do not make that argument.

[2] To be clear, here Martin & Rose have (unwittingly) switched their attention from the content plane to the expression plane, confusing salience of expression (size, colour, layout position) with salience of content.

[3] This is misleading, because it is untrue. While it is true that the photograph provides an instance of 'the dark-skinned peoples' mentioned in the texts, the texts above and below the photograph say nothing whatsoever about the meaning of the photograph:

See further in the following post.