How verbal and visual semiotic resources first reproduce — and then dismantle — ageist stereotypes, tracing Grandpa Frank's journey from the margins of the page to its warm, celebrated centre.
As life expectancy rises, children's earliest encounters with narratives play a formative role in shaping their perceptions of ageing and later life. Picturebooks — inherently multimodal texts — combine verbal and visual resources to communicate cultural understandings of age.
Pratt emphasises that the central question is not merely what children learn, but how they learn about the lifelong process of growing up and growing older. Research indicates that ageism emerges early, with negative attitudes affecting both today's older adults and children themselves as future older persons. Such early-formed attitudes are sustained through recurring narrative patterns and evaluative language.
Studies show that older characters in children's literature are frequently portrayed in biased, stereotypical, or one-dimensional ways — often limited to grandparent roles — overlooking the diversity of ageing and contributing to the reproduction of ageist discourse. In response, the concept of positive aging has emerged as a counter-discursive framework, highlighting lifestyles, attitudes, and activities that enhance well-being and quality of life in later years.
Despite these insights, systematic analysis of how ageing and older characters are represented in contemporary picturebooks remains limited. This study addresses that gap by examining how ageing is discursively constructed through linguistic and visual modes — exploring character roles, traits, evaluative patterns, and the interplay between text and images in shaping cultural understandings of later life.
Unlike illustrated books, where images merely accompany narration, picturebooks construct meaning through the interaction of visual and verbal elements within one multimodal discourse structure.
Negative attitudes toward later life form early and are sustained through repeated narrative patterns and evaluative language, affecting both today's elders and tomorrow's.
Every life stage offers opportunities for health, fulfilment, happiness, and creativity — a framing children can be encouraged to understand from the start.
Books let children understand themselves, others, and new perspectives — underscoring the discursive power of the picturebook.
Drawing on Halliday's social semiotics and Kress & van Leeuwen's visual grammar, Painter, Martin and Unsworth offer a refined framework for reading picturebooks across three simultaneous kinds of meaning.
Who or what is depicted (participants), the actions or relations between them (processes), and the contextual details of where, when and how (circumstances). Physical appearance offers cues about age and social role.
The interaction between characters and readers through image act and gaze, social distance and intimacy, involvement and power — complemented by attitude, contact and modality.
Organisation and emphasis through information value (left = given, right = new; upper = ideal, lower = real), salience (prominence by size, colour, focus) and framing.
Within this paradigm, age operates as a key axis of power: children's literature functions as a site where age-related meanings are produced, negotiated, and naturalised. Researchers agree that decline-oriented discourses dominate, framing older adults as a homogeneous group characterised by physical deterioration, loss, and dependency. As Rose observes, the concept of ageing itself is historically associated with negative semantic prosodies, including weakness and diminished vitality.
At the same time, multimodal discourse allows for the possibility of ideological transformation. While many texts reproduce dominant ageist narratives, others challenge them by reconfiguring visual and linguistic patterns — foregrounding agency, relationality, and diversity in later life.
Picturebooks as integrated constructs in which verbal and visual elements form an inseparable whole.
Meaning emerges through multimodal semiosis rather than through isolated modes.
Image and text combined in one space, or spatially separated to suggest distinct roles in meaning-making.
Parallels between childhood and old age that frame older adults as dependent and childlike — yet may also enable empathy and shared vulnerability.
Situated at the intersection of linguistics, children's literature studies, and age studies, the research treats age as a socially and culturally constructed category — "human beings are aged by culture" (Gullette, 2004) — and examines how language, narrative structure, and visual design jointly construct old age and intergenerational interaction in The Frank Show (Mackintosh, 2012).
How linguistic choices, evaluative expressions, and narrative structures reproduce or challenge age-related stereotypes — since no book is ideologically neutral.
The organisation of the story over time and the transformation of meaning across the plot, tracing how the child-narrator's evaluative stance evolves.
Framing, colour, posture, and spatial composition read as semiotic resources contributing to meaning-making.
Lexical patterns, evaluative language, and narrative perspective are examined to reveal how ageing is characterised and how the child narrator's perception develops across the story.
The images are analysed for how they reinforce or challenge textual meanings — focusing on posture, gestures, clothes, visual prominence, and activity, and their interaction with the words.
A young boy is tasked to present a family member to his class. His reluctant choice — Grandpa Frank — becomes the narrative vehicle through which age stereotypes are first articulated, then dismantled. Verbal and visual modes move together along a single arc.
Negative evaluative lexis and a comparison hierarchy frame Frank as ordinary; he is small, backgrounded, muted — intersemiotic reinforcement of "peripheral and inactive."
A green tattoo and an extraordinary wartime story turn the narrative — the perspective shifts from dismissal to admiration.
Hyperbole and dynamic posture place Frank centre-stage in warm colour and balanced composition: active, competent, socially meaningful.
Early lexical choices emphasise Frank's supposed ordinariness. The narrator's concern that his presentation will fail "because everyone has someone interesting to talk about" introduces an evaluative hierarchy grounded in interest, activity, and social prestige — reinforced through comparisons with peers' relatives. Through this accumulative listing and juxtaposition, youth and professional dynamism are positioned as normative, while old age is positioned as lacking value.
"And that's it, I've run out of things I can tell about Frank."Mackintosh, 2012 — a discursive closure encoding old age as narratively unproductive
The classmates' relatives the narrator measures Frank against — with Grandpa Frank initially positioned as having little to tell.
Schematic visualisation of the explicit comparison the text builds (Tom's uncle Marlon, Hannah's mum, Paolo's mum, Kristian's dad, Hugo's stepbrother). Not measured data.
How the child-narrator's stance moves across the story — from embarrassment and distancing to admiration and pride.
A conceptual mapping of the evaluative arc the analysis describes; the curve illustrates direction and turning point, not numeric scores.
Contrastive structuring and temporal sequencing establish a binary between past and present. Expressions such as "just sits in his chair" and "is always around" linguistically construct passivity; Frank's preference for "doing things the old-fashioned way" and nostalgic utterances like "They don't make 'em like that anymore" reinforce a valued past against a devalued present. A list of dislikes — noise, today's music, gadgets and gizmos, any ice cream that isn't vanilla — frames him as resistant to change.
A key narrative shift occurs when Frank recounts his wartime experiences. When he "rolls up his sleeve," he reveals a green tattoo and tells an extraordinary story behind it. Hyperbole — "captured one hundred enemy with nothing but his wit" — constructs a cognitively superior, almost mythic agent; the simile "like African bees" intensifies danger; the auditory imagery of "bullets whistling all around" evokes a kinetic, chaotic battlefield. These linguistic resources work in synergy with dynamic posture to consolidate Frank as a heroic figure.
The same character read against five semiotic dimensions: from low salience, muted colour and marginal placement to amplified salience, warm colour and central, relational presence.
Encodes the qualitative contrasts the analysis draws between Frank's opening depiction and his wartime/closing depiction; values are illustrative of direction, not measurements.
The final scene completes the transformation. Frank is seated at a round table with children, centrally positioned and surrounded by others; warm colours and balanced composition encode interpersonal closeness and social integration. The exchange — "You bet it did, hombre", delivered with a wink — softens pain into playful confidence, while the coordination "Frank and me" signals shared status and relational alignment.
"And everybody cheered for my granddad Frank and me."Mackintosh, 2012 — a shift from minimisation to collective recognition
How representational, interpersonal, and compositional meanings build — and then rebuild — the construction of age across the book's spreads.
Frank and the boy are small, backgrounded figures; muted palettes against saturated surroundings encode low salience and peripheral status — yet their proximity signals connection.
The narrator's posture and grey-toned depiction index embarrassment and affective distance — visualising "just my granddad" as social insignificance.
Spatial and temporal juxtaposition of Frank against historical and modern settings amplifies his separation from the contemporary world.
Typewriters, gramophones and old cameras operate as semiotic signs of the past, anchoring Frank outside the modern world and supporting the linguistic construction of old age as outdated.
Frank is placed centrally in commanding stances; foreground positioning and dynamic posture amplify salience and invite admiration — verbal and visual modes work complementarily.
Seated at a round table among the children, warm colours and balanced composition encode closeness and social integration — the reframing made whole.
Age-related meanings are dynamically produced through evaluative lexis, narrative strategies, and visual semiotics — and the same resources that reproduce ageism can also disrupt it.
Early minimisers and negative descriptors construct older adulthood as passive, marginal, and socially insignificant; shifts in the wartime episodes reframe the character as agentive and socially relevant, guided by focalisation and temporal structuring.
Salience, colour, spatial positioning, and proxemics reinforce the progression — moving from marginalisation to inclusion and relational closeness, with static composition giving way to dynamic, vividly coloured spreads.
Intersemiotic relations initially reproduce ageist meanings but later support their reconfiguration — the picturebook both reproduces and disrupts age ideologies.
By focusing on a single, richly illustrated text, the study underscores the capacity of children's picturebooks as sites of discursive socialisation, where multimodal resources work to both reproduce and challenge age-related ideologies. While the findings cannot be generalised across all children's literature, they offer a methodological template for multimodal discourse analysis of age representations — one that future studies can extend to larger corpora and cross-cultural contexts.
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