Exploring Liminality Through the Linguistic, Visual, and Material Design of There’s a Ghost in this House

Abstract Liminality is a temporal and spatial concept that readers can encounter in various children’s literary texts. In Oliver Jeffers’ There’s a Ghost in This House readers are invited to explore the liminal spaces between what is ‘real’ and ‘not real’ as they engage with the narrator to find the ghost who is said to live in the house. In this article, the combination of linguistic, visual, and material elements in Jeffers’ book are analysed through the lens of liminality. The analysis shows that multimodal grammar resources of negotiation, modality, graduation, and visual resources of colour, vector, and layout create ambiguity about who the ghost in the house really is. It explores the playfulness of the visual and material design and considers how this text might encourage readers to think about how we know what is real. These insights aim to guide educators in developing metalinguistic awareness among children as they read and interpret the text.