Text & Talk

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.

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