Seeing Meaning: 6 A Relational Semiotics of Visual Media

Having examined immersion, temporality, multimodality, and visual metaphor, we now synthesise these dimensions into a coherent relational framework. Visual meaning is not represented symbolically; it is actualised through the interplay of perception, attention, and evaluative construal.

---

1. Recapitulation of Strata

Each analytical dimension contributes to the semiotic field:

• Immersion and perspective: Position the viewer within the perceptual environment, making observation participatory.

• Temporality: Structures attention and transformation, turning sequential or animated elements into narrative and relational coherence.

• Multimodality: Integrates shape, colour, motion, depth, and sound into patterns of emergent meaning.

• Visual metaphor and value-tokenisation: Embed evaluative, affective, and aesthetic significance within the perceptual field.

Each stratum operates relationally: meaning emerges not from individual elements, but from their alignment and interaction.

---

2. The Viewer as Co-Constituent

In visual media, the semiotic event is enacted in the co-constitution of viewer and image:

• The viewer’s perceptual orientation, attention, and embodied engagement are integral to meaning.

• Spatial and temporal structures guide relational focus, while multimodal patterns orchestrate affective resonance.

• Evaluative significance is actualised only through the viewer’s participatory construal.

Systemically, the viewer functions analogously to the lexicogrammatical system in language: a necessary stratum through which semiotic potential is realised.

---

3. Systemic Model of Visual Semiotics

We can formalise visual meaning as a relational system:

Stratum	Function	Analogy to SFL
Immersion & Perspective	Viewer positioning	Interpersonal meaning
Temporality	Sequential and dynamic structuring	Textual meaning
Multimodality	Integration of sensory channels	Experiential & textual meaning
Value-tokenisation	Evaluative and metaphorical significance	Experiential + interpersonal meaning

The table illustrates how relational alignment across strata actualises semiotic potential, producing meaning as an emergent property of perception, attention, and evaluative construal.

---

4. Analytic Consequences

This systemic model yields several insights:

• Visual meaning is relational and embodied; it cannot be reduced to symbolic coding.

• Each stratum interacts dynamically, with temporal and multimodal structures modulating evaluative resonance.

• Analysis requires attention to both perceptual affordances and the viewer’s participatory engagement.

• The semiotic field is pre-grammatical: composition, attention, and alignment function analogously to grammatical systems in language.

Thus, the framework preserves SFL’s systemic-functional rigour while extending it to iconic-relational media.

---

5. Outlook: Towards Interactive and Virtual Media

The relational semiotics outlined here scales to interactive and virtual modalities:

• Co-constitution becomes reciprocal: the viewer’s actions influence temporal, spatial, and multimodal dynamics.

• Immersion, temporality, and multimodality are intensified, and evaluative construal is increasingly contingent on interaction.

• Meaning remains emergent and relational, highlighting the adaptability of the semiotic system across new technological environments.

By integrating all strata, we see that visual media generate meaning not by representing the world symbolically, but by actualising relational construals through embodied perception, temporal sequencing, multimodal alignment, and evaluative interpretation.

---

Series Conclusion

The Seeing Meaning series has traced a systematic path from the distinction between symbolic and iconic semiotics, through immersion, temporality, multimodality, and visual metaphor, to a coherent relational semiotic framework. Visual meaning emerges as an enacted, embodied, and evaluative phenomenon — a relational event realised in perception, attention, and interpretation.