week 4 - visual syntax

Week 4 - Visual syntax, semantics and pragmatics

Visual syntax is basically the grammar of visual images. Semantics is the cognitive process where we try to make sense out of what we see. And lastly pragmatics, it is where the context can be used to in another meaning, for example.

Traditional linguists argue that the images cannot be considered as a language since it does not carry a formal grammar. However it can be argued that since according to traditional linguist, the alphabets symbolize sounds that we utter which is known as phoneme, therefore this can be applied to what we perceive such as colors, which is known as coloreme; it can still connotes feelings and meaning hence creating language.

Our eye movement is important when it comes to interpreting an image; there are 5 laws in this. Firstly only certain image will attract our attention, secondly the fixations of eyes are dependent on the things we wish to see, third the parts that contain information attracts more eye fixation, fourth different kinds of picture gives different fixations and visual learning, and lastly positive correlation between number of fixations and visual learning. (petterson,1993)

Here is an example:

                  When reading a text, our eye movements are fixed starting from top left and gradually moving to the right. You may notice why I put a picture of an arrow on the top left and the title on the top right; my main goal on doing this is to prove this theory, if it is true you may have fixed your eye movement on the arrow first (which proves the first law) and then proceed to looking to the picture of a potato (which proves the second law), which shift our fixation to the texts below trying to figure out what the purpose of the arrow (which proves the third, fourth and fifth law)