Adapting Relevance Theory to Accommodate Visual Communication

On the basis of relevance theory’s claim that the relevance principle underlies all forms of communication, Chapter 3 examines how the RT model can be applied to communication involving visuals, and what adaptations are called for to achieve this goal. After reflecting on what constitutes visual communication, and showing how static visuals often combine with written language to create multimodal meaning, all of the RT concepts discussed in Chapter 2 are reconsidered with reference to their pertinence to analyzing visuals. This reconsideration will not only benefit visual and multimodal theories but will also provide new angles on classic RT. Whereas many RT concepts function without any problem when applied to visuals, there are others that cannot straightforwardly be “translated” to the visual realm and therefore need adaptation. The problematic issues mainly result from the fact that visuals typically have a structure and depicted entities, but no grammar and vocabulary. This leads to the questions of whether visuals can nonetheless be “coded”—which in turn has consequences for their possible underlying “logical form”—and whether information in visuals is necessarily always to be inferred or is sometimes actually decoded. Several examples are discussed to clarify these issues. In the final sections, there is a brief discussions of the relation between RT and Blending Theory, and of RT’s problematic take on metaphor.

Figurative representation of death in the Italian comic book Dylan Dog

The canonical representation of death as the Grim Reaper is a well-known trope in art. The main aim of this paper is to analyze this trope as it appears in selected instalments of the Italian comics series Dylan Dog. Fauconnier and Turner have extensively discussed its complexity by describing it in terms of the Blending Theory/Conceptual Theory model. As a complex integration of several mental spaces, including a space with an individual human being dying, and a harvest space, the Grim Reaper blend involves metaphoric and metonymic interactions of non-counterpart elements (Fauconnier & Turner 1998). This model will be used as a starting point in the analysis of the corpus consisting of four separate Dylan Dog stories. In the selected issues, the Grim Reaper appears in both the traditional version: a skeleton-like creature dressed in a monk’s robe and holding a scythe, as well as variants in which its appearance gains new and unusual characteristics. It will be demonstrated how the artists' use of the comics medium, with its combination of written text and static visuals, enables certain creative varieties on the classic trope.