Depiction of the Family’s Relationships in Selected Children’s Short Stories: A Multimodal Analysis (Summary)

Abstract

This study aims to apply the frameworks of Michael Halliday’s (1985-2004) Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) and Transitivity, Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) Visual Grammar, and van Leeuwen’s (2005) Inter-mode relations to four selected children short stories which are taken from Disney movies. These short stories are Frozen (2013), The Incredibles (2016) Finding Nemo (2016), and Brave (2016). These short stories shed the light on the nature of the relations between the family members, present conflicts between them, and assert that love and understanding between the family members can save and rescue all the family or sometimes the world around them. The findings of this study reveal that meaning does not depend only on the written text; it depends also on various aspects such as gaze, angle, distance, colors, and so on. Hence, in the selected short stories, the meanings conveyed through the visual representations match the meaning conveyed through the textual representations.