Relations Between Verbal Language and Visual Image in Student’s Textbook Implementing the Concept of Metafunctions

This research is about the use of verbal language and visual image to realize the metafunctions in student’s textbook. In order to see the process of meaning making in multimodal text, the researcher analyses the implementation of ideational, interpersonal, and textual meaning. The data was taken from conversation sections in Interchange Student’s Book 1. It consists of verbal language in the form of dialogues and visual image in the form of pictures. There were 16 conversation sections chosen from 16 chapters in the book. This research uses multimodal discourse analysis; using three instruments to classify the data. The checklists are from Eggins (2004) about metafunctions in verbal language, Van Leeuween (2006) about metafunctions in visual image, and Royce (2007) about the relations in verbal language and visual image. In ideational meaning, the result of the study shows that verbal language which dominates the conversation is the material proces; while in visual image, the reactional process is the highest number of process happens. Thus, the verbal-visual relations in ideational meaning found are collocation and repetition. Furthermore, the result in interpersonal meaning finds out that the most common verbal language used is statement; while in visual image, the medium shot is mostly found. Thus, the verbal-visual relation in interpersonal meaning realized through reinforcement of address is interaction between represented participant and represented participant. Moreover, in textual meaning, the result of verbal language shows that the most common used theme is topical theme; while in visual image, the information value is mostly left-right. Thus, the verbal-visual relation in textual meaning shown in reading path is left-right.

The plastic of clothing and the construction of visual communication and interaction: a semiotic examination of the eighteenth-century French dress

The article presents an account of the visual relations created by garments through their plastic formants, examining the role played by form, material, and composition in creating body hierarchies that produce prescribed behaviors between different subjects. The work dissects the concept of thematic role from the Greimasian theory, investigating the manners in which an eighteenth-century wedding dress presents the chaining of programs governing materials, garments, and the body in the production of narrative interactions between subjects. The work utilizes a combination of Greimas’ method with the Visual Semiotics continued by Floch and Oliveira, as well as Hammad’s Semiotics of Space which permit the exam of optical relations created in the body through its clothing – relations that can be read both as manifesting values that are historically and socially determined, or in the act of apprehension of an object. The eighteenth century provides a type of “original” case, whose results are pertinent to a broader study of the relations between body and dress: the work concludes with the understanding that Fashion changes through the transit of values and roles invested in the body and dress – a set of changes closely linked to the construction of social roles.

Schulzowska „teoria obrazu” w interpretacji Anny Juraschek

The article is a review of and a discussion with the recent monograph by Anna Juraschek, Die Rettung des Bildes im Wort. Bruno Schulz’ Bild-Idee in seinem prosaischen und bildnerischen Werk, Göttingen 2016. Juraschek has put forward the following thesis: alongside his own specific philosophy of language expressed in his narrative works and essays, Bruno Schulz also suggests a particular philosophy of image/picture, which he develops in his visual art. This “program” is not specified and may be reconstructed only by interpreting his graphic works; it is, however, corroborated by the poetics of Schulz’ stories. Juraschek regards the “word” and the “image” in Schulz as artistic entities, and emphasizes the visual nature of his fiction and the narrative qualities of his graphic works. She points at Schulz’s crossing of the boundaries between different arts and claims that the writer criticizes the very notion of mimesis (a statement that, according to the reviewer, may be questioned). Juraschek tries to reconstruct the main sources inspiring Schulz’s idea of image/picture: the classic European painting, German literature (i.e. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and Joseph von Eichendorff), as well as German philosophers and cultural critics such as Walter Benjamin. According to the reviewer, there are three points that Juraschek’s study can contribute to Schulz studies. First, the German scholar succeeds in systematizing different kinds of verbo-visual relations and interactions in Schulz’s oeuvre. Second, she fully appreciates his graphic work which thus far seems to have been undervalued, especially by Polish scholars. Last but not least, Juraschek brings to the fore some striking affinities between the ideas of Schulz and those of Walter Benjamin. As a possible background of interpreting Schulz, the philosophical writings of Benjamin are a context which certainly deserves more investigation.

Localize, Assemble, and Predicate: Contextual Object Proposal Embedding for Visual Relation Detection

Visual relation detection (VRD) aims to describe all interacting objects in an image using subject-predicate-object triplets. Critically, valid relations combinatorially grow in O(C2 R) for C object categories and R relationships. The frequencies of relation triplets exhibit a long-tailed distribution, which inevitably leads to bias towards popular visual relations in the learned VRD model. To address this problem, we propose localize-assemble-predicate network (LAP-Net), which decomposes VRD into three sub-tasks: localizing individual objects, assembling and predicting the subject-object pairs. In the first stage of LAP-Net, Region Proposal Network (RPN) is used to generate a few class-agnostic object proposals. Next, these proposals are assembled to form subject-object pairs via a second Pair Proposal Network (PPN), in which we propose a novel contextual embedding scheme. The inner product between embedded representations faithfully reflects the compatibility between a pair of proposals, without estimating object and subject class. Top-ranked pairs from stage two are fed into a third sub-network, which precisely estimates the relationship. The whole pipeline except for the last stage is object-category-agnostic in localizing relationships in an image, alleviating the bias in popular relations induced by training data. Our LAP-Net can be trained in an end-to-end fashion. We demonstrate that LAP-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance on the VRD benchmark while maintaining high speed in inference.

Semiotics of the “third force”

The present paper analyzes the media representation of the idea of the “third force” in politics. The research focuses on how the notion is being staged and visualized in order to create the impression of a new and fresh agent in the race for power. The case of MOST, a political coalition which gained importance in the 2015 Croatian parliamentary election, seems particularly important and adequate for the purpose. I do not discuss programs, political aims or visions of the main political parties. Rather, I propose a semiotic analysis of public communication. Attention will be paid to performative aspects of television broadcasts, organization of the space where negotiations were held, visual relations between political actors. The broadcasts, and the broadly taken space of public contact, will be treated as a stage, and actions taking place on such a stage as a political drama, with a screenplay which may be, but is not necessarily, conscious and planned. When seen from this perspective, the focus of interest does not lie on the purposeful layout of seating in a meeting or a public communique, but on unconscious cultural patterns which have a great impact on our decisions, choices, and perceptions. Ultimately, the electoral success of MOST was related not only to its program, but also–or maybe mostly – to its performative policy and its consistent positioning as a new actor in the political field.

Sacred Forms and the Crowd's Guilt in Late Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Execution Imagery

As new histories of the public execution are published, cultural perceptions of crowds are again enjoying scholarly interest. This contribution evaluates the role to be played by visual culture in crowd culture, weaving an account that draws from a closer analysis of live visual relations to explain both crowd impulses and its afterimages. A visually structured history can be navigated in order to examine the murder on 20 August 1672 of Jan and Cornelis de Wit at the hands of a street crowd, a determining event in the Dutch ‘disaster year’ of 1672. Giving close examination to contemporary prints, a drawing and a play, the contribution makes two overarching observations: first, that a Christological reading of the execution site strongly informed all of the after-images of the murders. Moreover, sacredness worked as a schema for the mob's own part during the tragedy. Second, the crowd's behaviour followed a pattern of structured theatricality and merriment that is best understood in the context of historical disturbance culture. The Dutch crowds of 1672 offered a double bill of religious and secular visual logics, blurring the limits of a judicially ordered punishment and producing in the tacit testimonies examined here a marked affective response.