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Article published In:
Pragmatics and Society
Vol. 12:2 (2021) ► pp.189–223

Towards a discourse-semantic approach to visual narrative analysis

The case of the BBC news story of Islamic State (IS)

| Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University | Kafr El-Sheikh University

The present study propounds a novel discourse-semantic approach that problematizes the social semiotic analysis of visual narrative in two respects: (i) the lack of a model that can explain the plurifunctional structure of visual acts of communication in general and (ii) the failure to provide the deep structure underlying the characters and/or objects in visual narrative in particular. Redressing these two shortcomings, the approach is methodologically geared towards analysing the visual narrative grammar that encodes the 2017 BBC image-enabled news story of Islamic State (IS). The proposed approach rests on two theoretical models: (i) Roman Jakobson’s (1960) communication model of language functions; (ii) Algirdas Julien Greimas’s (1966, 1987) structural-semantic model of actant grammar. The study has reached two major findings. First, theoretically, the visual narrative analysis of images demands the presence of both (1) a theory that can adequately explain the plurifunctional structure associated with the semiotic complexity of visual communication and (2) a structural-semantic model that reveals the deep structure of the actants that enable the dramatis personae to relate to the events featuring in the mono-/multimodal discourse of narrative. Second, on a practical level of the BBC’s visual storyline, IS has been represented within three actant-based enunciation-spectacles: (a) victimhood with Subject versus Object, (b) beneficiariness with Sender versus Receiver, and (c) villainy (self-presented and other-presented) with Opponent/Victim versus Helper.

Keywords: actants, BBC, discourse-semantic approach, dramatis personae, images, Islamic State (IS), language functions, narrative grammar, news stories, plurifunctional structure, social semiotics, structural semiotics, visual narrative
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Problematizing visual narrative analysis in social semiotics
  • 3.Visual narrative grammar: A discourse-semantic approach
    • 3.1Jakobson’s model of language functions
    • 3.2Greimas’s model of actant grammar
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1Data and procedure
    • 4.2Research question(s)
  • 5.Transcoding visual narrative grammar in the BBC news story of IS
    • 5.1Functions of the visual acts of communication in the BBC news story of IS
    • 5.2Visual deep structure: Actants and enunciation-spectacles of BBC visual narrative
  • 6.Conclusion: Summary and findings
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 3 June 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.18045.sal
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