On The Image- Language Co-occurrence And Interrelationship In Multimodal Texts, With Particular Reference To Halliday’s & Barthes’ Views

In the literature of this 12th Philadelphia University symposium we read that our present age is the age of image. It would not be far from the truth to say, however, that one of the most outstanding features of this age is that it is an age of signs. There is a proliferation of signs, not only in the usual broad sense of, for instance, “Danger” or “Personnel Only”, but in the broad semiotic sense. There are linguistic signs of different forms; orthographic or written, and verbal or spoken signs. There are also many types of visual signs; gestures, photography, painting, cinema, theatre, television, sculpture, fashion design, dance, advertising images, icons on computer screens, architectural design, and many other images. All of these signs are used to influence our behaviour in one way or another: they are used to guide, to instruct, to constrain or to allow, to protect or to warn, etc. These linguistic and visual signs may be used in isolation, or they may be used in combination. This potential for a multiplicity and variety of signs, in combination with the growth and role of the internet and multimedia in what has been characterised as the “information revolution”, has raised consciousness of the visual sign as a conveyor of meaning, so much so that there is an increasing interest amongst educationists of a possible need for developing students’ abilities in visual literacy, rather than simply literacy. The co-occurrence of and interrelationship between visual and linguistic signs in multimodal texts is the issue that is addressed in this paper.