Meaning Patterns’s Updates

Review of "Making Sense" by Sole Alba Zollo, University of Napoli

This book and its companion, Adding Sense, aim to create a top-level ontology, a grammar that schematically ties together the meaning of everything. The authors, Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis start the book by saying that “Making Sense is a grammar of everyday life”. Following Halliday, they use the word grammar in a wider sense, because the meanings of writing and speech make sense only if they are taken in relation to other modes (image, space, sound, body and object), especially nowadays where all these elements are interconnected due to the advent of digital technologies. This is multimodality while transposition is the phenomenon of reframing a meaning in one form and then another simultaneously. The two authors want to defy the strictest approaches to linguistics which tend to categorize meaning by suggesting a broader definition of grammar because for them meanings are dynamic. Meanings are not fixed categories, they can move and can be transposed. p. 443.

... Cope and Kalantzis propose that every act of meaning always conveys meaning at the same time in five ways: reference, agency, structure, context, and interest. Meanings are not fixed. For this reason, they introduce the concept of “transpositional grammar”. ... They offer, as never before in the history of media, a common platform for the construction and rendering of meaning in multiple forms. p. 444.

... The narrative style of this monograph allows the authors to present decisive moments in the development of meaning-making tools and practices and tell them as stories. The book is, in fact, defined as a non-fiction novel that can be read from the beginning to the end, but each section can be read separately. Overall, this work makes a significant contribution to the studies on multimodality. Scholars in the field of both linguistics and media studies will find in it plenty of valuable and interesting information about meaning and its functions across forms and their multimodal manifestations. In addition, this book can be helpful to educators whose main educational challenges are education inequality, learner diversity and the potentials of new technologies, but also beneficial to all those people who daily make meanings in our contemporary society in various ways and through different approaches. p. 445.