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Textual functions of metonymies in Anthony Browne’s picture books: A multimodal approach

  • Arsenio Jesús Moya-Guijarro

    A. Jesús Moya-Guijarro is currently professor in the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). He has published several articles on children’s literature and tourist discourse in international journals such as Review of Cognitive Linguistics, Word, Text, Functions of Language, Journal of Pragmatics, Atlantis and Text and Talk. Among other books, he is co-editor of The World Told and The World Shown: Multisemiotic Issues (2009, Palgrave Macmillan) and author of A Multimodal Analysis of Picture Books for Children (2014, Equinox). Address for correspondence: Department of English, Avda. de Los Alfares s/n, 16,077 Cuenca (Spain).Email: arsenio.mguijarro@uclm.es

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Published/Copyright: May 3, 2019

Abstract

The main aim of this article is to study the communicative functions of visual metonymies in a sample of picture books written and illustrated by Anthony Browne, an internationally acclaimed author and illustrator of children’s books. The three tales selected for analysis are Voices in the Park, Gorilla and Piggybook, all of which have been highly praised by critics and become universally accepted as classics. Within the frameworks of visual social semiotics and cognitive linguistics, the strategies available to the illustrator to represent characters in picture books have been identified and analysed in the contexts where they were produced. The results of the analysis show that visual metonymies are used in Browne’s picture books essentially to highlight or minimize a character’s status over another fictional actor, to ascribe negative qualities or attitudes to the main characters and, in turn, to foreshadow what is yet to come in the story.

Funding statement: This study was carried out as part of the research project FFI2017-85306-P (The Construction of Discourse in Children’s Picture Books that Challenge Gender Stereotypes and the Concept of Traditional Family), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness.

About the author

Arsenio Jesús Moya-Guijarro

A. Jesús Moya-Guijarro is currently professor in the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). He has published several articles on children’s literature and tourist discourse in international journals such as Review of Cognitive Linguistics, Word, Text, Functions of Language, Journal of Pragmatics, Atlantis and Text and Talk. Among other books, he is co-editor of The World Told and The World Shown: Multisemiotic Issues (2009, Palgrave Macmillan) and author of A Multimodal Analysis of Picture Books for Children (2014, Equinox). Address for correspondence: Department of English, Avda. de Los Alfares s/n, 16,077 Cuenca (Spain).Email: arsenio.mguijarro@uclm.es

Acknowledgements

My sincere gratitude to José Manuel Ureña and the members of AMULIT research group for their invaluable input on metaphor and metonymy. I would also like to thank Chris Butler for helping with the statistical analysis presented in Section 3. I take full responsibility for any errors which may still remain.

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Published Online: 2019-05-03
Published in Print: 2019-05-27

© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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