Presentation Schedule
Worth a Thousand Words: Visual Texts and the Creation of an Extensive Analytical Word Bank (110286)
Session Chair: Nicholas De Jager
Saturday, 11 July 2026 17:20
Session: Session 5
Room: UCL Torrington, G13 (Ground Floor)
Presentation Type:Oral Presentation
In academia, we often hear about terminology to describe language, or a specialised vocabulary to evaluate, judge, or critique linguistic texts on a deeper and more meaningful level. At the core of linguistics, such terms can include phonemes, morphemes, compound sentences, complex sentences, imperatives, and so on. It can be argued that this nomenclature exists for the sole purpose of creating meaning from written text as it originally appears -- to identify different uses of rhythm and diction, or to perpetuate these linguistic phenomena in academic discourse. This raises the question: Can a similarly expanded vocabulary or metalanguage be developed for nonverbal, visual-verbal, exclusively visual, or multimodal texts? The seven art elements (line, texture, colour, space, shape, form, and tonal value) are often reserved for conversations in the art world, either during the creative process or as a starting point for analysing existing texts. The same elements can also be seen in mass media, for example cartoons, comics, graphic novels, animated series and films. These forms of expression are mostly characterised by hand-drawn and coloured images, where lines, shapes, and textures can always be identified but rarely articulated. This study encourages readers to rethink the ways in which we currently interpret nonverbal texts, specifically using the linguistic mode. With reference to several classic works of art, possibilities are explored for the formulation of an extended word corpus to analyse visual texts in a more pragmatic and scientific manner.
Authors:
Nicholas De Jager, Akademia Institute of Higher Education, South Africa
About the Presenter(s)
Dr Nic de Jager is currently a lecturer at Akademia Institute of Higher Education, Pretoria, South Africa.
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