Text to Images: The Aesthetics of Pictorial Signs

A text is the set of lexical or visual signs that act as cues to guide a reader's mental decoding and meaning-making operations. This article explores how the meaning-expressive potential of the lexical and pictorial forms of signification are defined on multiple levels. Semiotics provides a theoretical and methodological framework for isolating and explaining the levels of meaning, both of language as text and the image as pictorial text. This article highlights some philosophical and theoretical implications of semiotics, language, meaning-making, and pictorial text with a view towards the development of a viable semiotic methodology for analyzing pictorial text. Pablo Picasso's Guernica is used as an example of how signification works on multiple levels.