Schlagbilder, Schreckbilder, Wohlfühlbilder: Eine diskurslinguistische Analyse von visuellen Konstruktionen mit handlungsleitendem Charakter am Beispiel der Islam-Debatte

Discourse analytical scholarship has yet to agree on a shared approach to data containing, and significantly shaped by, images. The discipline continues to face challenging terminological and definitional tasks concerning important aspects of visual semiotics such as „image texts“, „key images“, „visual types“ etc. Attention has recently been shifted towards the multi-modal character of visual constructs. This poses the question if visual-linguistics can provide adequate analytical means for action-inducing visual constructs, including so-called „images provoking scare“ (Bonacchi 2015) and „images with calming effect“ („reassuring images“). Through a case study of images in the ongoing debate about Islam, this article demonstrates that a multi-modal analysis needs to cover not only semiotic aspects of the visual and the verbal but also multi-dimensional, cognitive aspects of interpretation pertaining to movement and tactile perception, and which contribute significantly to „fear effects“ or to “calming effects”.