7 - Co-text Images

Summary

The chapter examines co-text images in multimodal texts. It highlights the increasing importance of images in political discourse. The intersemiotic relations which language and image may enter into are described with an emphasis placed on intersemiotic convergence. Two areas of multimodal research in Cognitive CDA are identified: multimodal constructions and multimodal metaphor. In connection with multimodal constructions, the chapter considers news photographs and shows how news photographs and their captions may coincide with respect to the conceptual dimensions of schematisation, viewpoint and attentional distribution. In connection with multimodal metaphor, the chapter shows how metaphors expressed verbally may also be expressed visually or cross-modally in verbal and visual components of the text. The role of intertextuality and interdiscursivity in accessing source-frames is highlighted. Two case studies are presented. The first considers visual and cross-modal examples of war and animal metaphors in immigration discourse. The second considers body-poses as a particular source of metaphoricity in images.