Communicative functions of visual metonymies in picture books targeted at children in two different age groups. A multimodal analysis

Abstract

This article aims to examine how visual metonymies, in combination with verbal language, contribute to the representation of characters in a sample of six picture books written and illustrated by Anthony Browne and intended for children in two different age groups: 0–6 year-olds (also known as early readers) and children over six years of age. Social semiotic (Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. 2006 [1996]. Reading images: The grammar of visual design. London: Routledge; Painter, Clare, James Martin, and Len Unsworth. 2013. Reading visual narratives: Image analysis of children’s picture books. London: Equinox), and multimodal cognitive approaches (Forceville, Charles. 2009. Metonymy in visual and audiovisual discourse. In Eija Ventola and Arsenio J. Moya-Guijarro (eds.), The world told and the world shown: Multisemiotic Issues, 57–74. Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan; Forceville, Charles, and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi. (eds.). 2009. Multimodal metaphor. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter) have been adopted to carry out this research. The results reveal that the proportions of metonymies and complete representations are significantly different across the tales intended for 0–6 and 7–9 year-old children. In addition, the analysis shows that source-in-target metonymic depictions (Ruiz de Mendoza, Ibáñez, F. J., and Velasco O. I. Díez. 2002. Patterns of conceptual interaction. In René Dirven and Ralf Pörings (eds.), Metaphor and metonymy in comparison and contrast, 489–532. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter) are essentially used by illustrators to highlight some essential aspects of the characters and the plots.

Keywords:

• multimodality
• social semiotics
• systemic functional linguistics
• metonymy
• picture books

Acknowledgments

This study was carried out as part of the research project FFI2017-85306-P (The Construction of Discourse in Children's Picture Books, AMULIT), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness. I would also like to thank Chris Butler for helping with the statistical analysis presented in Section 3. Finally, my sincere gratitude to Julia McNally for her stylistic suggestions and helpful advice for the finishing touches of the article.

Notes

1 Anthony Browne is the first British illustrator who won the Hans Christian Andersen Award. He also won the Kate Greenaway Medal for his work in children’s literature. Today he is an internationally acclaimed author and illustrator of children’s books.

2 A full description of the visual systems available to construe experience, enact social relations and compose visual space in picture books is given in Painter et al. (2013), chapters 2, 3 and 4, respectively.

3 Another interesting aspect that could have been developed in this research is the analysis of children’s understanding of the metonymies used by the illustrator. However, this is beyond the scope of the current study, which essentially aims to determine the communicative functions of visual metonymic representations in picture books intended for young readers. In addition, although I have not discussed how metonymies work in Browne’s picture books, the results found may be relevant for those designing children’s stories intended for certain age groups.

4 The SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) is a useful statistical tool to find out whether there is a significant association between two variables, in our case, representations of characters and age groups.

5 In this research the analysis was exclusively carried out until the concrete operations stage I, since the tales intended for children over 9 years old contain a predominance of language over illustrations and, therefore, lack the visual material that is necessary to carry out the analysis proposed here.

6 Worry dolls come from Guatemala where still today children trust them to take away their worries as they go to sleep. Most of them are hand-made and dressed in traditional Mayan style.