© Applied Semiotics / Sémiotique appliquée 4: 11/12 (2002) : 181-202 181 Semiosis and the Picture-Book: On Method and the Cross-medial Relation of Lexical and Visual Narrative Texts Peter Pericles Trifonas 1 OISE / University of Toronto Semiotic Dimensions of Textual Form and the picture-book The term “text” has evoked various meanings according to particular disciplinary perspectives (Trifonas, 1993). In cognitive psychology, it has been represented as the sum of authorial propositions stimulated by the lin- guistic variability of forms; in semiotics, as the set of lexical or visual signs that act as “cues” to guide the reader’s inherent predilection for mental de- coding operations. Structuralist theorists after Ferdinand de Saussure (1916) determined the text to be “an object endowed with precise properties, that must be analytically isolated” and by which the “work can be entirely de- fined on the grounds of such properties” (Levi-Strauss cited in Eco, 1979, p. 3). Some proponents of poststructural theorizing have conceived of “textuality” as the substantive equivalent of the author’s productivity, a po- lyphony of (a)synchronic voices realized via intertextual processes of com- munication for the social exchange of thought surmising the tensions of knowledge, power, and desire (Kristeva, 1969; Barthes, 1970). Others (Eco, 1976; 1979; Peirce, 1931; Derrida, 1974) have cultivated a non-metaphysical conception of text/uality where meaning-making on the part of the reader is considered to be a generative movement embodying a semantic glide or eli- sion of infinite, yet playful, regressions that negate objectivity and render the content of the written word undecidible in relation to a seemingly uncon- trollable labyrinth tracing a network of possible interpretation. The pic-