Languages systems and children’s literature: The essentiality of omission in the languages of picture books

Abstract

Peter Hunt (2005) describes picture books as “a polyphonic form that embodies many codes, style, textual devices and intertextual reference, and which frequently pushes at the boundaries of convention”. Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott, similarly, explain that pictures are iconic signs that describe or represent, while words are conventional signs that narrate. Picture books communicate through the collaboration and the compatibility of these two sets of signs (2006). Besides, the reading of picture books also requires the imaginative involvement of readers. Inter-textual knowledge is essential in decoding the signified of both verbal and visual texts. Nevertheless, some picture books rely on the intentional usage of “omission”, or the “gap” between the two sets of signs. The use of omission initiates readers to fill in the absence information with their syntactic and semiotic knowledge, and additionally, to acknowledge the “omission” as the critical agent that completes the story. Here, Jon Klassen’s This Is Not My Hat (2012), Agnès de Lastrade and Valeria Decampo’s Phileas’s Fortune: a story of self-expression (2009), and Carson Ellis’ Du Iz Tak? (2016) are explored. These works exemplify how the absence of certain information in the verbal and visual sign systems, or in the incongruence between them, could bring out and accentuate the messages of the stories.