Intersemiotic Relations Between Verbal and Visual in Children's Picture Books: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis

Abstract

This study examined how intersemiotic relations between verbal text and visual illustrations contribute to narrative meaning construction in selected children's picture books using the framework of Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA). The study focused on three types of intersemiotic relations proposed by Royce (2013), namely complementary, reinforcing, and expanding relations. A descriptive qualitative research design was employed. Thedata sources consisted of three children's picture books: The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter, and We're Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury.  Ten extracts were purposively selected through close reading as the most representative instances of verbal-visual interplay in narrative construction. Findings reveal that the extracts are distributed across three categories: reinforcing relations (5 extracts), where verbal and visual modes mutually strengthen meanings in scenes of movement, confrontation, and character description; complementary relations (3 extracts), where both modes contribute distinct but mutually necessary meanings across emotional and atmospheric dimensions; and expanding relations (2 extracts), where illustrations add emotional depth and symbolic significance beyond the verbal text. Reinforcing relations emerged as the dominant pattern. The study demonstrates that verbal-visual interplay is the fundamental mechanism through which narrative meaning is constructed in children's picture books, offering a methodological contribution to multimodal narrative analysis in children's literature.