Visual grammar
Visual grammar was proposed in 1996 by Kress and van Leeuwen based on the findings from semiotic school, which was mainly concerned with illustrating linguistic written words. Halliday ((1967) saw language as a depiction of semiotic mode represented by ideation, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions. Kress and van Leeuwen built their theory by redefining the words used by Halliday, such that they called them representational, interactive, and compositional metafunctions, respectively. In this new definition, representational connotation focuses on how pictures created in any particular piece represents the participants used in the image. It is split into the narrative and conceptual representations, according to the Transitivity framework developed by Halliday. Narrative representation gives extensive actions and events, change processes, and transitory spatial arrangements.
Interactive meaning concerns the social links between interactants and evaluative orientations that actors or reactors adopt towards one another and to the area symbolized by the text. Its discernment relies mainly on attitude, modality, contact, and social distance. Social distance describes the links between the viewer and the producer of the image and the represented participant as a frame size function. Attitude categorizes image into objective and subjective, thus deeming them naturally neutral. Contact describes the demand relation between the represented and the targeted audience and then conveys the intended meaning through offers and demands following Halliday’s four speech acts. Lastly, modality emanates from linguistics and describes the credibility of statements concerning the world and explores its markers’ roles, such as colour differences, saturation, and differentiation.
On the other hand, compositional meaning associates the interactive and representational pictorial meaning using framing, value, and salience. The value of information mainly deals with the placement of components and their attached trusts. The information can be arranged in different layouts based on the designer’s understanding of culture and the target audience. Salience describes the factors considered in the hierarchy of placing various elements based on their sizes, focus sharpness, and total contrast. Lastly, framing refers to the link between connectedness degree and differentiation. However, it is critical to understand that framing and salience offer practical know-how for image interpretation, though it can result in over-interpretation since the researcher can be subjected to unusual decisive meanings