Can pictures say no or not? Negation and denial in the visual mode

•We make an inventory of types of negation and denial as recognized in semantics.•We present building instructions for the representation of these types of negation and denial.•We show that, under certain conditions, in the visual mode, removal is interpreted as negation.

In principle, verbal and image languages have different ways of coding conceptual content. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that both modes, the linguistic and the visual, can convey identical contents, and indeed, linguists have claimed that images are not suited for expressing the meaning of certain linguistic categories, like negation. As the linguistic literature argues convincingly, in natural language a distinction between negation and denial is justified. Employing insights in visual communication and cognition science, this paper explores the possibilities for visually expressing negation and/or denial. At the hand of both the analysis and an empirical pilot study of a set of advertisements, we come up with a positive answer to the title question: yes, pictures can say ‘no’.