Conceptual And Narrative Process

We have seen how the lexico-grammatical form of language is internally organised in general functional regions (i.e. the ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions). We looked at the ideational or conceptual meaning through the vocabulary and grammar of the texts. Just like the metafunctions of linguistic texts, visual texts also have metafunctional characteristics. By applying Halliday’s concept of metafunctions to other modes beside the linguistic, Kress and Van Luewen (1996) came up with a grammar for visual design where they assume that the visual mode draws upon the same semantic system as does language, and that everything said about the semiotic code of language could be said about the semiotic code of pictures. As a result,

Conceptual processes are seen to “represent participants in terms of their generalised and more or less stable and timeless essence” and Narrative processes “serve to present unfolding actions and events, processes of change, transitory spatial arrangements”. Thus, Conceptual processes can be approximated with existential and relational processes of Halliday 's Transitivity system, and the Narrative processes can be approximated with the material, behavioural and in limited way mental and verbal processes. The figure given below depicts the representational (conceptual) meanings involved in visual

Actional and Reactional. Actional processes are those in which some kind of physical action relates the represented participants. They can be non-transactional, where there is only one participant and therefore no action directed towards anyone or anything, or transactional, where there are two or more participants and something is in a sense exchanged. In this situation there is an actor, as well as a goal and a beneficiary. The actor’s prominence can be realised by relative size, place in the composition, contrast against a background, colour saturation or prominence, sharpness of focus, and the 'psychological salience ' which the human face has for viewers. As we can see in the section regarding the “Author of the Month” in the Routledge email, we can see Actional process of the participant – the frontal face of author in focus- with a non-transactional physical action of looking at the