Contemporary children's picture books provide a rich domain for developing theory and analysis of visual meaning and its relation to accompanying verbal text. This book offers new descriptions of the visual strand of meaning in picture book narratives as a way of furthering the project of 'multimodal' discourse analysis and of explaining the literacy demands and apprenticing techniques of children's earliest literature. Reading Visual Narratives uses the principles of systemic-functional theory to organise an explicit account of visual meaning in relation to three perspectives: the visual...

This book offers a systematic linguistic critique of language development studies since the 1960s. It uses systemic theory to explain and interpret the development of child language, with discussions and illustrative texts to explicate the analysis. Painter provides a rich source of data for child language researchers in all fields, and aims to make a systematic theory more accessible to those interested in the ideas put forward by M.A.K. Halliday in his writings on language development.