We are honored by the generous review of the first of our two transpositional grammar volumes by John R. Bateman, Professor of English Applied Linguistics at Bremen University in Germany, one of the world's leading authorities on multimodality. Here is an extract:

Cope and Kalantzis adopt a distinctive organizational format in which detailed characterizations of the generalized functions and their expressions in forms are interwoven with over 100 brief (often just two or three pages), but always interesting, discussions, comments and evaluations of authors, works and objects that Cope and Kalantzis see as having had significant formative influences on their approach. In many respects, the book(s) can then be seen as entering into ‘dialogues’ with that formative background, with references to sources and topics ranging from Wittgenstein to Warhol, from Unicode to Husserl and phenomenology, from Frege to Jacques Tati, from the Citro€en DS to URLs and TCP/IP, from Eisenstein to the conduit metaphor, and many, many more. This organization is well signposted, with the table of contents arrayed in two interleaved columns, one for ‘elements of a theory’, the other for ‘examples and discussion’. The presentational style is consequently, as the authors themselves note, frequently oriented to narrative and history, telling stories around the various topics that multiply inform and weave together the aspects of theory addressed. And, although it is perfectly possible to read the book from beginning to end, it is also explicitly structured to support more ‘random access’, where the reader can usefully jump to particular points of interest and follow connections back to, or away from, theory as desired. There is also extensive cross-referencing, enabling topics to be followed ‘horizontally’ across the text's development, as well as a supporting website, which presents further (more visual) examples and discussion. As a consequence, this is a book that could only be written by authors such as Cope and Kalantzis, who have themselves lived through the sheer breadth of the lines of development they bring to readers' attention, making connections and leaps which would in the normal, more circumscribed, business of everyday research rarely occur.

Bateman, John A., "Book Review. Making Sense: Reference, Agency, and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning Making, Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis,” Journal of Pragmatics, 172:164-66, 2021, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2020.10.008