Visual Grammar Research Articles

Analyzing Multimodal Construction of China’s Image Based on the Illustrated Articles in The Economist

The shaping of national image is a two-way process, including “self-shaping” and “shaping by others”. Magazines are one of the important channels for disseminating information. Taking The Economist’s China-related reports in 2023 as a case, this article focuses on 195 reports on politics and diplomacy as well as economy, conducting quantitative and qualitative analyses of the visual images from the perspective of visual grammar, and further exploring the multimodal construction of China's image in The Economist. The research shows that the images in The Economist fully realize the representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning. In terms of the representational meaning, narrative representation is the major process. Images that reflect the reactional process, action process and symbolic process are used more frequently. In terms of the interactive meaning, “offer” images, long shot images and images with horizontal perspective appear more frequently. In addition, information value, salience, and framing are interrelated to achieve the compositional meaning. The political and diplomatic image of China constructed by The Economist is that China is a country with increasing power, which is authoritarian internally and threatening externally. In terms of economy, China is portrayed as a country with a fast growing economy which can withstand the global economic crisis, but its economic prospects are not optimistic, and the “China threat theory” still exists.

Analysis of Phenomenon of Tianshui Malatang's Soaring Popularity from a Multimodal Perspective

Abstract: Contemporary communication studies show that short videos, as the most important form of information dissemination today, have a more multidimensional and immersive communication effect compared to traditional print media and other channels. Since this information medium inherently contains numerous social symbols with expressive characteristics, this paper will analyze the short videos that led to the viral phenomenon of "Tianshui malatang" based on Kress and Leeuwen's visual grammar and Halliday's theories of language as a social semiotic. This paper analyzes the phenomenon of the "Tianshui malatang" a fusion of regional tourism and local specially food that has gone virtual on Chinese short video platforms, using a multimodal discourse analysis approach. The analysis shows that the "Tianshui malatang" video enhances the sensory interaction between the viewer and the screen in terms of visual effects, and in terms of narrative expression, it leads the viewer to generate positive feedback on the video through the presentation of various elements.

Poverty porn or poverty planning? Slum photography and the politics of spatial representation

This forum article critically examines the politics of visual representation in urban informality, interrogating the genealogies and contemporary manifestations of what we term the “slum gaze.” Drawing on postcolonial theory, feminist visual studies, and critical urban geography, we trace how colonial visualities continue to shape aesthetic constructions of urban marginality through “poverty porn” and spectacles of abjection. We argue that dominant visual regimes not only reflect but actively produce urban informality as a pathologized state of being, rationalizing dispossessive planning interventions while obscuring subaltern spatial knowledges and practices. The article unpacks the contradictory role of visuality in urban planning and policymaking, where GIS mappings and documentary photography paradoxically render informal settlements simultaneously hyper-visible and illegible to state bureaucracies. Against reductive visual grammars inherited from colonial modernity, we advocate for participatory visual methodologies that amplify resident-driven representational practices. By centering community-based visual epistemologies, we gesture toward more emancipatory modes of seeing and narrating the heterogeneous spaces of urban informality. Ultimately, this intervention calls for a paradigmatic shift in how urban scholars and practitioners engage visually with marginalized communities. We contend that cultivating critical visual literacies attuned to the politics of representation is essential for imagining and enacting more just urban futures. This requires moving beyond simplistic denunciations of “poverty porn” toward a praxis of critical visuality that unsettles universalizing gazes while legitimizing plural ways of seeing, knowing, and inhabiting the city.

A Comparative Study of Media Symbols from the Perspective of Visual Grammar: A Case Study of Marine Ecological Protection Posters in China and Western Countries

Social developments are bringing about changes in how we communicate and represent ideas. With the tendency of globalisation, marine ecosystems are facing threats such as overfishing, pollution, and climate change, and marine ecological protection has become a focus of attention for all countries. This paper adopts Kress and van Leeuwen’s framework of visual grammar analysis to compare and analyse the use of symbols in Chinese and Western marine ecological protection posters from the perspectives of representational meaning, interactive meaning, and compositional meaning. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of 100 Chinese posters and 100 Western posters reveal similarities and differences in symbol selection, cultural context, and compositional approach. Results show that Chinese posters tend to integrate traditional cultural elements and natural symbols to convey the concept of environmental protection in a harmonious and warm way, such as the use of ink painting style and paper-cutting art to represent marine organisms, while Western posters focus on directly displaying the hazards of marine pollution by means of strong visual contrasts and modern design elements to stimulate the audience’s sense of urgency and responsibility, such as the display of marine animals trapped by plastic rubbish. This research not only deepens the understanding of the theory of visual grammar but also provides valuable references for the design of future environmental posters, emphasising the importance of using visual symbols and communication strategies in different cultural contexts in order to convey environmental messages more effectively and to promote the development of global marine conservation.

Christian martyrdom and Yusin censorship's conundrum: the 1977 screening suspension of Toward the High Place (1977–1981)

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the unconventional censorship case of Toward the High Place (1977), a religious film that dramatized the life of Reverend Ju Gi-cheol. Despite passing censorship with ease, even selected as a ‘superior film’ by the state, Toward the High Place's screening was delayed multiple times and ultimately prohibited, only to be shown after the collapse of Park Chung Hee regime. Given the Protestant Church's crucial role in the state's diplomatic relations with the United States, the decision to prohibit the film's screening was highly unusual. Through a close reading of the film's censorship file and other archival documents, I reconstruct the various censorship processes that came to constitute the film's visual grammar. As an instance of unofficial censorship, I argue that Toward the High Place demonstrates how censorship practices, socio-political conditions, and the changing status of organized religion influenced cinematic representation, while also revealing the limits of official censorship procedures.

Defining Sexstainability

ABSTRACT This article interrogates how Pornhub’s Sexstainability campaign engages in corporate citizenry to improve its stakeholders’ sustainable behaviour. The article shows how sexualized language and visual grammar are used to convey an educational message about sustainable practices establishing Pornhub as a corporate citizen with a desire to improve society through sustainability, presenting sustainability as something anyone can and should value while positioning heterosexual men as its particular audience.

Learnable and Expressive Visualization Authoring through Blended Interfaces.

A wide range of visualization authoring interfaces enable the creation of highly customized visualizations. However, prioritizing expressiveness often impedes the learnability of the authoring interface. The diversity of users, such as varying computational skills and prior experiences in user interfaces, makes it even more challenging for a single authoring interface to satisfy the needs of a broad audience. In this paper, we introduce a framework to balance learnability and expressivity in a visualization authoring system. Adopting insights from learnability studies, such as multimodal interaction and visualization literacy, we explore the design space of blending multiple visualization authoring interfaces for supporting authoring tasks in a complementary and fexible manner. To evaluate the effectiveness of blending interfaces, we implemented a proof-of-concept system, Blace, that combines four common visualization authoring interfaces-template-based, shelf confguration, natural language, and code editor-that are tightly linked to one another to help users easily relate unfamiliar interfaces to more familiar ones. Using the system, we conducted a user study with 12 domain experts who regularly visualize genomics data as part of their analysis workfow. Participants with varied visualization and programming backgrounds were able to successfully reproduce unfamiliar visualization examples without a guided tutorial in the study. Feedback from a post-study qualitative questionnaire further suggests that blending interfaces enabled participants to learn the system easily and assisted them in confdently editing unfamiliar visualization grammar in the code editor, enabling expressive customization. Refecting on our study results and the design of our system, we discuss the different interaction patterns that we identifed and design implications for blending visualization authoring interfaces.

A multimodal analysis of Nigerian public health awareness posters

This article presents a multimodal analysis of the public health awareness posters from Katsina state, Nigeria. 100 posters were purposefully sampled and analysed using the generic structure potential (GSP) of printed advertisements after Cheong, Kress and Van Leeuwen’s visual grammar, Martinec and Salway’s model of text-image relations and Airhihenbuwa’s PEN-3 model. The findings show that display, which refers to the photographic show of the message, and announcement, which is the most noticeable linguistic component, are among the obligatory components. Display mostly occurs in an intangible form as it is difficult to be depicted concretely, while the obligatory announcement is always the ‘primary announcement’, i.e. the announcement which conveys the central idea of the poster. Moreover, language and image contribute to the meaning-making process. Likewise, the pictures perform an ‘exemplification function’ in logico-semantic relations. Therefore, the GSP of Nigerian public health awareness posters (NPHAP) is proposed as: lead ^ display ^ (emblem) ^ announcement ^ (enhancer) ^ (tag) ^ (call-and-visit information).1 This means that for informational material to qualify as a Nigeran public health awareness poster, it must exhibit at least the obligatory components (those not in brackets).

Emak-Emak Representation in Start-Up Ads: Verbal and Non-Verbal Analysis of Indonesian Moms

Women stereotyping is always interesting to be discussed. This paper is concerned with verbal and non-verbal meanings to portray Indonesian moms, or Emak-Emak represented in two official videos of GoMart and GrabMart. This study owes the framework of Halliday’s transitivity system (2014) to analyse the verbal meaning and Kress & Leeuwen’s interpretation of visual grammar to analyse the non-verbal meanings. The outcome of the verbal analysis using transitivity shows that the procedures used by GrabMart and GoMart are focused differently. While GrabMart focuses more on the material process of “doing” rather than “happening”, GoMart tends to emphasis on the relational process of “attributive” and primarily on “identification”. GoMart portrays Emak-Emak's stereotypes more objectively, whereas GrabMart is more subjective to shape the viewer's perception of them. This study offers recommendations for future research by taking a comprehensive approach to the phenomenon of gender stereotyping in online audio-visual advertisements, analyzing the interaction of verbal and non-verbal meanings in various advertisements, thoroughly examining the relevant stream of metafunctions, and proposing ideas.

A Review of Social Semiotics in the Interaction of Text and Image

As the major form of anti-epidemic promotion in network media, anti-epidemic promotion picture applies diversified multi-modal symbol resources in the construction of meaning. By exploring the interactive relationship between visual grammar and conceptual metaphor/metonymy, a joint multimodal research framework is created to clarify the meaning construction and mechanism contained in anti-epidemic pictures. The research shows that conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy not only provide cognitive motivation for the realization of visual grammar, but also inspire the associations of images to the real world. Visual Grammar highlights the cognitive meaning expression of conceptual metaphor and metonymy, stimulates readers’ interpretation of conceptual metaphor and metonymy. The research explores the combination of two mainstream multimodal research paths, and provides a new perspective for multimodal discourse analysis practice.

Multimodal Meaning Construction of Anti-Pandemic Promotion Picture from the Semiotic-Congnitive Perspective

As the major form of anti-epidemic promotion in network media, anti-epidemic promotion picture applies diversified multi-modal symbol resources in the construction of meaning. By exploring the interactive relationship between visual grammar and conceptual metaphor/metonymy, a joint multimodal research framework is created to clarify the meaning construction and mechanism contained in anti-epidemic pictures. The research shows that conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy not only provide cognitive motivation for the realization of visual grammar, but also inspire the associations of images to the real world. Visual Grammar highlights the cognitive meaning expression of conceptual metaphor and metonymy, stimulates readers’ interpretation of conceptual metaphor and metonymy. The research explores the combination of two mainstream multimodal research paths, and provides a new perspective for multimodal discourse analysis practice.

Against observation: the panoramic legacy of Sergei Loznitsa

ABSTRACT Critical reception of Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s documentary films typically concludes that the director privileges observational techniques to depict historical events and political movements, resulting in conflicting judgements on his films’ significance and reducing Loznitsa’s own involvement in the depicted events. This article addresses the techniques and visual grammar of Loznitsa’s 2014 film Maidan and challenges the film’s status as an example of the observational documentary mode. This article proposes approaching Maidan through a recognition of the influence of the panorama on realist representation from its inception in the late eighteenth century to its transformation of cinema in the twentieth century, showing how Loznitsa has developed a panoramic filmmaking language since his early short films. Maidan contrasts the ideas of objectivity and passivity typically assigned to observational films by constructing a historical narrative about the events that occurred in Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti during the Euromaidan movement of 2013–2014. This renegotiation of Loznitsa’s filmmaking mode reveals Maidan’s unique contribution to non-fiction representational forms as well as to narratives of national identity within the post-Soviet context.

A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Advertisements and Movie Posters

Multimodal discourse analysis, grounded in Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar, has been widely applied in advertising, movie posters, and e-commerce. Studies often use Kress and Van Leeuwen's visual grammar to understand how images convey meaning. It will compare the multimodal theoretical analysis of movie posters and ads, focusing on textual, color, and layout modalities, as well as stylistic features and internal modalities. Additionally, we will explore enhancing user experience in advertisements through multimodal analysis, aiming to increase impact, expressiveness, user engagement, and precise placement.

Social Semiotic Analysis of a Pet Protection Post on Instagram

This study applies Kress and Van Leeuwen's Visual Grammar framework to analyze an Instagram post advocating pet protection. The research focuses on representational, interactive, and compositional metafunctions to understand how visual and textual elements combine to convey urgency and empathy. The representational analysis highlights the dog's isolated portrayal and the use of the pronoun "me" to foster an emotional connection. The interactive analysis examines indirect gaze, close-up shots, and low angles to engage viewers and emphasize their role in pet protection. The compositional analysis reveals the strategic placement of verbal and visual elements, with bold text and contrasting colors enhancing the message's salience. This multimodal approach demonstrates the synergy between visual and textual elements, creating a cohesive and persuasive narrative. The study's findings align with existing literature on social semiotics and Visual Grammar, emphasizing the importance of integrated visual strategies in social media advocacy. The research offers practical insights for designing effective pet protection campaigns, highlighting the role of Visual Grammar in promoting responsible pet ownership and animal welfare. Future research should explore the long-term impact of these visual strategies on viewer behavior and the effectiveness of different semiotic modes across various social media platforms.

The Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Asian Games Videos from the Perspective of Visual Grammar

Hangzhou released a video “Wave Rider” for the Asian Games. It presents the scenery, appearance and highlights of the city, and publicizes rapidly and widely the city’s sports and culture. Based on the video, the study analyzes the role of multimodal symbols such as words, pictures and images from the aspects of reproduction, interactive and composition meaning based on the theory of visual grammar, and in-depth investigates the construction of image and culture, so as to promote the dissemination of Hangzhou’s urban culture, and to strengthen the city’s self-confidence and the country’s self-confidence.

Reading, Viewing, Writing, Creating and Talking about Persuasive Multimodal Texts in the Elementary Years

In this article, we overview the research literature exploring the teaching of evaluative language in written and/or visual texts in the elementary years of schooling. We then review the recently redrafted Australian Curriculum: English to identify the emphasis given to the teaching of evaluative language and the grammar of visual design across the elementary years of schooling in Australia. Also featured is the importance of the persuasive genre, and multimodal texts. The focus of our research work is on one Year 4 elementary years school teacher who scaffolds her students to bring all of this knowledge together to read/view and write/create in ways that take seriously the powerful written and visual language use of persuasive multimodal texts. The students are undertaking an inquiry topic “Sharks: Dangerous or Misunderstood?”. As part of the unit, students are exploring the written and visual grammar of danger signs. The students explore these texts by making a danger sign they would expect to see at the beach, as well as a danger sign for something that is not typically dangerous such as a ladybug. We examine the students’ use of the grammar of appraisal and the grammar of visual design, and their capacity to discuss the knowledge/power relationship of their own persuasive multimodal texts during an interview with their teacher.

Taking a stand from the periphery: negotiating and resisting the white gaze in public images of Black women’s civic protest

ABSTRACT This essay utilizes the iconic photograph of Ieshia Evans at the 2016 Black Lives Matter protest in Baton Rouge, LA to complicate dominant understandings of iconicity in relation to racial icons. We argue that Evans’s photograph became iconic because it tapped into a visual grammar of respectability marked by an aesthetic of demureness. We urge critical and visual scholars to look to what we call the iconic periphery, a discursive realm of potentially oppositional or counter-hegemonic images that circulate in abundance at the margins of iconic photographs, to find a radical aesthetic with the potential for social and racial justice.

Multimodal Discourse Analysis on Female Representations in Film Posters

This study aims to identify the multimodal features used in film posters of Filipino movies produced between 2010 and 2023 that are currently found on Netflix. It aims to highlight the various stereotypes of women depicted through various multimodal modes using Multimodal Discourse Analysis and anchored on Visual Grammar by Kress and Van Leeuwen and Systemic Functional Linguistics by Halliday. Moreover, through this study, the researcher examined how these representations affected female viewers’ construction of their feminine images and their overall impression on the film posters. There were 40 film posters analyzed and 11 female participants interviewed. The results revealed that the interactional (gaze, size of frame, and perspective), compositional meanings (salience and informational value) of the film posters were tools to display different female representations. Also, the representational meanings made up by vectors and different structures and process underscored different female representations. These representations were also observed in the themes that were developed from the responses of the participants, which include: women’s stereotypical image portrayal, progressive female characters, stereotype subversion, and objectification. Finally, the participants also had similar opinions regarding the influence that film posters have on them when choosing which movies to watch, and the most prominent visual elements that attract the viewers.

The Construction of Interpersonal Meanings in Jiaqi Li's E-Commerce Live Streams: Integrating Verbal and Visual Semiotics

This study conducts a multimodal discourse analysis of the live streaming of Jiaqi Li, a well-known Chinese streamer. Integrating systemic functional grammar and systemic visual grammar to explore the construction of interpersonal meanings in Li's live streams, the authors found that Li uses verbal semiotics to convey information and feelings and, more important, to create his different interactive roles as an authoritative opinion leader, a protector of consumers’ benefits, and a friend who shares his experiences and recommends products. This study offers insight into e-commerce discourse and communication, adding to the literature on live streaming in commerce and business communication.

Femvertising or Faux Feminism? A Critical Discourse Analysis of Sport Femvertising Campaigns

This study investigates the representation of female athletes in Gatorade's Sister in Sweat (2019) and Adidas’ Reimagine Sport (2020) Femvertising campaigns. Adopting a critical feminist lens, this study examined verbal and visual strategies and the post-feminist elements that sports brands apply to communicate female-empowering messages. Guided by Fairclough's framework of critical discourse analysis and Kress and van Leeuwen's visual grammar, a multimodal critical discourse analysis was conducted to analyze verbal–visual strategies and semiotic resources used to construct/challenge the gender relations in sports. Also, following Gill's post-feminist media culture, recurring themes that characterize female athlete representation are identified. These themes include femininity as a bodily preoccupation, sexualization, individualism and choice, self-surveillance, and intersectionality. Results reveal that, despite the sports brands’ support of gender equality and female empowerment through femvertising, gender stereotypes still exist within the campaigns.