The study of meaning has long been dominated by linguistic models. Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) has shown that language is a stratified semiotic system, where meaning is realised through lexicogrammar, and lexicogrammar through phonology or graphology. This model has proven remarkably powerful for symbolic systems in which the relation between meaning and expression is arbitrary — where signs must be learned as conventions rather than perceived as natural correspondences.
Yet this symbolic orientation does not fully account for how images and animations mean. In visual media, the relation between meaning and expression is iconic: it is grounded in the natural correspondences between perceptual experience and the forms that give rise to it. The semiotic challenge, therefore, is not one of decoding conventions, but of understanding how perception itself becomes patterned as meaning.
1. From Symbolic Mediation to Perceptual Construal
In language, meanings are mediated through symbolic form. A lexicogrammatical clause does not resemble what it construes; its power lies in the capacity of the linguistic system to arbitrarily symbolise experiences, relations, and abstractions. The correspondence between meaning and expression is systematic but non-natural: the grammar must bridge the gap.
In contrast, images do not bridge that gap — they inhabit it. The relation between the perceptual form and the experience it construes is continuous: lines, shapes, and colours correspond directly to the way light and form are apprehended by the visual system. The grammar of an image is therefore not a set of symbolic rules but a field of perceptual affordances through which relational organisation emerges.
2. Experiencing an Image
Experiencing an image or animation is continuous with experiencing the visual world itself. The act of viewing recruits the same perceptual processes — spatial orientation, figure–ground distinction, depth mapping, and movement tracking — that operate in direct perception.
However, the visual field of an image is already organised as meaning: perspective, composition, and texture guide attention and invite interpretation. The viewer does not merely look at the image but through it — perceiving a world that appears as given, even though it is constructed. This immediacy of construal distinguishes visual semiosis from linguistic semiosis: where language symbolises experience, the image simulates it.
3. The Grammar of Visual Meaning
To describe this distinction in systemic-functional terms, we can say that visual meaning does not involve a grammar mediating between meaning and expression strata. The relation is natural rather than coded. The organising principles of visual semiosis are not grammatical systems but perceptual relations — proximity, contrast, directionality, salience, rhythm, balance.
Where the lexicogrammar provides choices for construing experiential, interpersonal, and textual meaning in language, visual media provide perceptual choices that serve analogous functions:
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Experiential: What is depicted and how its spatial and material relations are construed.
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Interpersonal: How the viewer is positioned in relation to the represented scene.
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Textual: How visual elements cohere compositionally and temporally as a field of attention.
Visual meaning, then, is not ungrammatical but pre-grammatical: its organisation precedes symbolic coding and operates at the level of relational perception.
4. Analytic Consequences
This shift in semiotic orientation entails several consequences for analysis:
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Meaning without mediation: Visual meaning is not translated through lexicogrammar but emerges through perceptual organisation.
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Field as grammar: The spatial and temporal field of the image is the locus of semiotic structure; compositional choices function analogously to grammatical ones.
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Viewer as participant: Since meaning is constituted through perception, the viewer is part of the semiotic process, not external to it.
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Natural expressivity: The iconic relation between form and sense produces direct construal — perception itself as meaning.
These principles define the visual domain as a relational semiotic in its own right, operating through alignment rather than convention.
5. Toward a Relational Semiotics of Vision
By reframing the image as a field of meaning in perception, we move beyond the binary of language versus image. Both are semiotic systems, but they differ in their ontological mediation:
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Language is symbolic: meaning realised through lexicogrammar, mediated by convention.
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Visual media are iconic-relational: meaning actualised through perception, mediated by embodied attention.
The task ahead is to unfold this distinction systematically: to describe how immersion, temporality, multimodality, and visual metaphor extend this foundational alignment between meaning and perception.
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