,, most horrible and unbearable, even when the most innocent bourgeois is concerned, is the fact that he cannot recognize any life experiences but his own '' ( pasolini, notes on the free indirect speech ) /,, My name is Dick and I make schtick ''

'Examining the word/image link in televised news, Meinhof (1990) lists three categories of such an interrelation: overlap, displacement and dichotomy. Such categories are a useful starting point for analysing the verbal/visual interrelation. However, the additional categories of symbolic contiguity, conflictuality and interplay (proposed here) are needed to describe the intricate ways in which the two planes intersect in cinema.
Symbolic contiguity, which is illustrated by a key episode from Pasolini's Decameron, concerns cases where the verbal plane has apparently nothing in common with the images on the screen, while at the deeper level of symbolic significance the link between the two still exists. In the category of conflictuality, the verbal and visual enter an open clash, which involves their contrasting truth-values. ' Roberta Piazza
Dept. of English, School of Humanities, University of Sussex