Blurb:

This chapter will briefly consider the literature on the picture book as a complex bimodal text before outlining the social semiotic model of SFL that provides the framework for the following three chapters. Each of these elaborates on one area of visual meaning and illustrates how it functions, with examples drawn from highly regarded picture book stories. The final chapter will look at correspondences and complementarities between the visual and verbal semiotics and suggest a framework for analysing a picture book as a visual–verbal unity. Topics include: 1.1 Picture books as a site for multimodal discourse analysis; 1.2 The picture book and its criticism; 1.3 Using systemic functional theory; 1.4 The current study