One of the most characteristic features of work described as “visual grammar” is not always visible at the level of terminology. It is visible instead in the direction of explanation.
Despite its systemic-functional inspiration, much of this work proceeds in a consistent way: it begins with the observable image and works upward toward meaning.
This orientation is so familiar that it can appear methodologically neutral. An image is presented. Its compositional features are identified. Colour contrasts, salience patterns, spatial arrangements, framing devices, and vectors of attention are described. From this descriptive base, interpretive claims are then constructed: this element signifies stability, that element conveys dynamism, this arrangement produces authority or intimacy.
The movement is from structure to meaning.
This is what we can call explanation from below.
It is important to be precise here. There is nothing inherently illegitimate about attending to structure. The issue is not descriptive detail. The issue is explanatory direction.
In an explanation-from-below model, structure is treated as primary. Meaning is treated as derivative. The analyst begins with the visual artefact as a self-contained object and asks what it might signify. Meaning is inferred from configuration.
Even when systemic-functional terminology is used, this orientation often remains intact. Terms such as “realisation”, “resource”, “choice”, or even “metafunction” may be deployed, but the analytical movement still proceeds from observed form toward hypothesised meaning.
In this respect, the methodological logic differs subtly but decisively from Halliday’s principle of the view from above.
From a systemic-functional perspective, explanation does not begin with structure. It begins with system.
Structures are not starting points. They are outcomes.
They are not interpreted first and then assigned meaning. They are explained as the realisation of meaning potential.
This inversion is not a stylistic preference. It is a theoretical commitment.
To see the difference clearly, consider what each orientation takes as primary:
- Explanation from below:Visible form → inferred meaning → tentative systematisation
- Explanation from above:Systemic potential → functional organisation → structural realisation
The two are not different emphases on the same process. They are different models of what explanation is doing.
In the first, the analyst reconstructs meaning from observable features. In the second, the analyst explains observable features through meaning.
This distinction is crucial because it determines what counts as explanation.
In the lower-up model, explanation is successful when it produces a plausible interpretation of what is seen. In the upper-down model, explanation is successful when it shows how what is seen is a realisation of a system of meaning.
The difference is subtle but consequential.
In practice, explanation-from-below tends to encourage a particular kind of analytical proliferation. Once meaning is inferred from structure, the system must be rebuilt inductively from repeated observations. Categories accumulate: types of salience, types of framing, types of gaze, types of composition. The result is often a rich descriptive inventory, but one whose systemic status remains uncertain.
This is precisely where the term “grammar” becomes methodologically significant. If “grammar” is understood as a system of meaning potential, then it must precede and explain such inventories. If it is understood as a label for recurring patterns, then it emerges only after those patterns have been observed.
The ambiguity of “visual grammar” therefore reflects a deeper ambiguity in explanatory direction.
Systemic Functional Linguistics, in its Hallidayan formulation, resolves this ambiguity through its methodological commitment to the view from above. Systems are not abstractions from structures. They are explanatory conditions for structures. Meaning is not inferred from form. Form is interpreted as the realisation of meaning.
Once this orientation is adopted consistently, explanation-from-below appears not as a competing theory but as a reversal of explanatory priority.
This is the first point at which the stakes of “visual grammar” become visible.
The question is not whether visual analysis should attend to structure. It must. The question is whether structure is taken as the starting point of explanation, or as something to be explained.
The remainder of this series will explore what changes when that distinction is taken seriously.
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