Within Hallidayan theory, stratification is not optional ornamentation. It is a defining property of language as a semiotic system. Content is organised through semantics, which is realised through lexicogrammar, which is in turn realised through expression. The strata are distinct but related through realisation.
In much work on visual analysis, however, stratification is either assumed implicitly, adapted loosely, or gradually weakened in practice. This weakening is rarely explicit. It tends to occur through small shifts in descriptive language that accumulate into structural consequences.
It is here that stratification quietly breaks.
The most common site of this breakdown is the relation between what is called “visual meaning” and what is called “visual form”. At first glance, this appears to reproduce a familiar distinction between content and expression. However, in practice, the boundary between the two is often unstable.
Colour, for example, is frequently treated as both expressive resource and bearer of meaning. Spatial arrangement is described both as formal composition and as semantic organisation. Framing is treated as a physical property of the image and simultaneously as a mechanism of interpersonal positioning. In each case, expressive features are interpreted directly as semantic content.
What begins as a distinction between strata gradually collapses into a single undifferentiated field of “visual meaning”.
This collapse is not usually argued for. It is enacted through analysis.
Once expressive resources are treated as already semantic, the need for a mediating stratum disappears. Expression becomes immediately meaningful rather than functioning as the realisation of meaning. The architecture of stratification is replaced by a direct mapping between observable features and interpreted effects.
This is a crucial methodological shift, because it changes the status of explanation itself.
In a stratified model, explanation proceeds through relations of realisation. One asks how a lower stratum realises a higher one. Expression is not meaning; it is the means by which meaning is made manifest. The analytic task is therefore to account for the organisation of meaning across distinct levels.
In a non-stratified or weakened-stratification model, explanation tends to proceed by attribution. Meaning is read off from form. Expressive features are treated as already carrying semantic value. The analyst interprets visible properties as directly meaningful without an intervening level of realisation.
The result is a subtle but important inversion. Instead of:
content → realised through → expression
we often find:
expression → directly interpreted as → content
This inversion has significant consequences for the notion of system. If expressive features are already meaningful in themselves, then the system of meaning is no longer clearly distinguishable from the inventory of observable resources. The stratified architecture that would otherwise organise explanation begins to flatten.
At this point, the term “visual grammar” becomes especially unstable.
If grammar is taken in the systemic-functional sense, it belongs to a specific stratum within a stratified system. But if stratification is not consistently maintained, “grammar” can no longer function as a precise architectural term. It becomes a general label for patterned meaning in visual form.
What is lost in this shift is not descriptive richness but explanatory depth. Without stratification, it becomes difficult to distinguish between:
- the organisation of meaning, and
- the interpretation of form
They collapse into a single analytical gesture.
From a view-from-above perspective, this is a critical loss. Stratification is precisely what allows explanation to proceed from higher-order meaning potential toward lower-order realisation without conflating the two. It preserves the possibility that what appears as form is not itself meaning, but a realisation of meaning.
When stratification is weakened, explanation is forced to operate at the level of observable configuration. Meaning is reconstructed rather than explained. Interpretation replaces realisation.
This is why the breakdown is described as “quiet”. It does not appear as an explicit theoretical claim. It appears as a gradual erosion of distinctions that are foundational to the architecture being invoked.
The question, then, is not whether visual analysis should interpret images. It inevitably will. The question is whether interpretation is grounded in a stratified model of semiosis, or whether stratification has been silently replaced by a direct correspondence between visual features and semantic claims.
Once this question is raised, the stakes of “visual grammar” become clearer still. For what is at issue is not only how images are described, but whether the architecture of explanation being assumed is recognisably systemic-functional at all.
This leads directly to the next question: what is missing when this architecture is present in name but absent in orientation?
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