THE ROLE OF GRAMMAR IN IMAGE READING MAY BE PARALLEL WITH LANGUAGE
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Authors: Abdolmajid Zakeri
Keywords: cognitive grammar, interpretation of pictures, intersemiotic translation, semantic memory, visual grammar
Abstract: The whole system that structurally manages all of the parts in a sentence is the grammar; but what provides logically semantic connection between words and other components is the semantic cognition – derived from an anthology or a cognitive corpus stored in a person’s semantic memory. The mind, using grammar the Operating System (OS) on which it is installed, refers to the mental lexicon, and generates meaning which leads to the perception; this is, mind as a Central Processing Unit (CPU) uses the grammar as an OS like Windows to process data (words and concepts) stored in the memory as a Hard Drive (HD). The semantic system is activated when connecting words interactively to represent the meaning of language. The grammar (OS) mechanically allows the mind (CPU) to analyze and combine the words (data) in memory (HD) to lead to the semantic cognition. The translation may be considered as a parallel process in which mind and language – engaging semantic memory – interactively collaborate to represent the meaning. Considering the intersemiotic translation as one of the three possible type of translation, besides the role of grammar on the meaning, two questions arise when we have a language versus an image instead of having two language to translate: Does the mind use an OS called grammar to do the same process for reading the meaning of an image as it does for a text? Is the integration process – structured by the grammar – between words in a sentence the same function applied among elements in a picture to be understood? Since the grammar provide a mechanism to understand the meaning generated from the semantic and syntactic knowledge, it plays a role more than a Mechanical Operating System (MOS) that only manages the words; because the semantic memory gives access not only to the mental lexicon but also to the images and representations stored in memory. So it seems that we're dealing with a visual grammar by which we also read the pictures. Sometimes we call words and put them together to describe an image; and somewhen we refer to our mental images (mental imagery) to imagine a text. Accordingly, now that the words and images are stored in semantic memory, and the mind performs such a process using the grammar, so this precisely formulated set of rules (grammar) goes beyond a syntactic operation system or even a visual grammar; we are dealing with a cognitive grammar! Image reading is an elemental form of image interpretation. In this research, we study the role of grammar in image reading in the form of a syntactic and semantic context other than language. Subsequently, we provide a brief comparison on the grammar of some languages in order to specify how the speakers of these languages may have different interpretations of the same image or photograph based on their grammar.