Narrative conjunction's junction function: The interface of narrative grammar and semantics in sequential images

• Visual narratives use framing to highlight different aspects of a scene.
• Narrative categories repeat using conjunction to elaborate on a discourse.
• Conjunction allows inferences of characters, scenes, actions, and semantic networks.
• Single images and conjunction can trade off in the framing of discourse content.
• Movement, deletion, and substitution provide diagnostics for narrative grammar.

While simple visual narratives may depict characters engaged in events across sequential images, additional complexity appears when modulating the framing of that information within an image or film shot. For example, when two images each show a character at the same narrative state, a viewer infers that they belong to a broader spatial environment. This paper argues that these framings involve a type of “conjunction,” whereby a constituent conjoins images sharing a common narrative role in a sequence. Situated within the parallel architecture of Visual Narrative Grammar, which posits a division between narrative structure and semantics, this narrative conjunction schema interfaces with semantics in a variety of ways. Conjunction can thus map to the inference of a spatial environment or an individual character, the repetition or parts of actions, or disparate elements of semantic associative networks. Altogether, this approach provides a theoretical architecture that allows for numerous levels of abstraction and complexity across several phenomena in visual narratives.