bullet" class="ql-align-justify">A grammar is a resource for meaning, the critical functioning semiotic by means of which we pursue our everyday life. It therefore embodies a theory of everyday life; otherwise it cannot function in this way ... A grammar is a theory of human experience. M.A.K. Halliday.¹

Making Sense is a grammar of everyday life. In our old-fashioned schoolish understandings, “grammar” was the syntax of language, rules for correct speaking and writing. Following Michael Halliday’s suggestion, we want to use this word in a wider sense, to develop an account of grammar as patterns in meaning.

Our reasons for wanting an expanded deﬁnition of grammar are twofold. First, the meanings of speech and writing have never made sense outside a wider understanding of the relations of text and speech to image, sound, body, space, and object. It makes even less sense to make such a separation today, in an era of pervasive digital media where these forms of meaning are so profoundly overlaid. This phenomenon we call “multimodality.” The activity of reframing a meaning in one form, then another, or several together at the same time, we call “transposition.”

The second reason for our broader deﬁnition of grammar is to challenge their very mode of operation, and more generally structuralist approaches to linguistics which classify and categorize meanings – singular versus plural, noun versus verb, ﬁrst person versus third, and a myriad of such distinctions. Defying the neat separations, we want to say that meanings are always ready to move. Their meanings are not just in what they are, but the possibilities in their imminent transposability.

To take the three examples that we have just mentioned from a conventional understanding of syntax: multiple things can be instantiated one by one, but their meanings in multiplicity (concepts) are very different from their meanings as instances. Entities have been constituted in action, and action conﬁgures entities. By empathy, I put myself in the position of an other.

The meaning is as much in the dynamics of movability as ﬁxed categories – after multimodality, a second dimension of this transpositional grammar. We call this “functional transposition.” We set out to develop concepts for a functional theory of meaning that will work across all the forms of meaning.

We propose in this grammar that there are ﬁve functions of meaning, ﬁve things that meaning does in everyday life, in human experience: reference, agency, structure, context, and interest. These are ﬁve ways “to parse” any act or artifact of meaning.

The ﬁrst three – reference, agency, and structure – are addressed in conventional accounts of language. In his functional grammar, Michael Halliday calls these ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions,^§0.3a although we mean something somewhat different for each of the three, and we want to create a conceptual framework which will work for image, sound, body, space, and object as well as speech and text. Making Sense addresses these three.

The remainder of our transpositional grammar, the functions of context and interest, we address in a companion book, Adding Sense. This is the conventional domain of a philosophy of meaning and a subdiscipline of linguistics that is frequently called “pragmatics.” However, once again, we want to escape the narrowness of language-centered accounts of meaning in order to create a grammar of the multimodal transpositions in context and the expression of interest.

Of course, this is too much even for two books, so we present our case around the theoretical skeleton of a grammar of multimodality, tangentially discussing relevant theorists and their thinking, and offering symptomatic examples of meaning-making activities. Our method is to weave between practices drawn from the scholarly disciplines of linguistics (mainly of the social, functional, and pragmatic varieties), philosophy, and history. In a time when the disruptions in ordinary life are so disorienting, a wide-ranging interdisciplinary approach is necessary.

Around its unfolding theoretical schema, the book has two supplementary devices: discussion of key theorists; and parsing examples of multimodal meaning practices. The theorists we have selected offer us the support we have found we need to think through the grammar as it unfolds in this book. We pass by them, one by one, mentioning them when their ideas seem germane to an idea of ours. We come to these folks at points where we feel it would be illuminating to bring them into the conversation. Each time we come back to them, it seems like we know them as friends. These people are the inspiration of our ideas, directly or indirectly; we need to acknowledge them as our sources. We also want to draw distinctions, because we have come to know and love them for their limitations as well as their virtuous insights.

In the selection of examples of multimodal meanings, we cross histories and cultures. Historically, we can’t know the speciﬁcity of the present except in the continuities and contrasts with its pasts. So, the book traces the origins and parses a number of practices and artifacts of the digital era, the historical evolution of textual practices in media such as writing and imaging over thousands of years, and also the meaning practices of “ﬁrst peoples,” at which point our frame of reference becomes tens of thousands of years.

Our cultural range includes: indigenous or ﬁrst peoples, with a focus on Australian peoples with whom we have worked at earlier stages in our research careers; the historical evolution of meaning practices in the Indian, Chinese, Arab, and European traditions; and the globalized social practices and cultural sensibilities of the digital age. So, the frame of reference for our grammar is global-wide and species-long. This means that, from a practical point of view, all we can do is offer pertinent and we hope also poignant examples.

In both of these supplementary devices, our method of presentation is essentially historical, so narrative in form. We want to connect the thinkers into the context of their thinking, and their interests as persons. We want to understand their meanings, not just in what they said, but in what we can now make of the meanings of their lives. In the examples, we want to ﬁnd decisiveor symptomatic moments in the development of meaning-making tools and practices, and tell these as stories. So, this book is part history of ideas, part philosophy of history. We’ve worked over the ground covered in this book several times before in publications connected with the development of our pedagogy of “Multiliteracies,” starting with the work² we did in the New London Group^*with Courtney Cazden,³ Norman Fairclough,⁴ James Paul Gee,⁵ Gunther Kress,⁶ Allan Luke,⁷ Carmen Luke,⁸ Sarah Michaels,⁹ and Martin Nakata.¹⁰ The version we present is more or less the same in terms of its conceptual framework, though we’ve reﬁned the terminology and made our central organizing principle the functions of meaning (reference, agency, structure, context, and interest) rather than its forms (text, image, space, object, body, sound, speech)as we did in our Literacies book.We’ve also done a lot of work designing, developing, and We’ve worked over the ground covered in this book several times before in publications connected with the development of our pedagogy of “Multiliteracies,” starting with the work² we did in the New London Group^* with Courtney Cazden,³ Norman Fairclough,⁴ James Paul Gee,⁵ Gunther Kress,⁶ Allan Luke,⁷ Carmen Luke,⁸ Sarah Michaels,⁹ and Martin Nakata.¹⁰ The version we present is more or less the same in terms of its conceptual framework, though we’ve reﬁned the terminology and made our central organizing principle the functions of meaning (reference, agency, structure, context, and interest) rather than its forms (text, image, space, object, body, sound, speech)as we did in our Literacies book.We’ve also done a lot of work designing, developing, and testing online multimodal writing environments for the purposes of knowledge work¹¹ and learning.¹²

A note about the form of this book and its companion, Adding Sense: they are written as if they were like a non-ﬁction novel that can be read from the beginning to the end. They have a cast of main characters who periodically come back onto the scene.However, realistically, many readers will dart all over the place, so the sectioning has been designed for that. Each section can be read separately. We try to help non-linear readings with cross-references marked thus^§0.0 when another relevant section will elaborate on an idea, provide an example, or describe a life. In this kind of reading, the text serves more as a dictionary of concepts or encyclo-pedia of illustrative examples, where matters of interest can be “looked up.”

And another note: this is just a work of writing. The reason is in part practical. We could have included images, but we wanted to use too many. We also wanted to include moving image, and sound, and other embedded media from the web. This might render on some e-book devices, but not all, and not in the print version. So, we have decided to put illustrative media in a slideshow on the web at meaningpatterns.net. We refer to the slides in this text thus,^* but they are not essential to its reading. This may seem a contrary move for a book on multimodality. But it is a pragmatic one given the affordances of the book as a medium.

In any event, writing is a habit of social theory. For the purposes of theorizing, text is a nicely old-fashioned form, and one that has for a long time well served social theorists, philosophers, and historians. Books are still good old things.

And ﬁnally, about us, our interest. Our profession is education, where the greatest challenges of our time are inequality of outcomes, learner diversity, and the transformative potentials of new technologies. This grammar does not directly address these speciﬁcally educational challenges – we have done that elsewhere.¹³ Rather, we want to cast these challenges in a broader frame of reference, where we hope that the terms of our discussion may be helpful not only to educators as designers of learning ecologies, but designers of all kinds, people who in their work and community lives make meanings in the social and material world in a myriad of ways.

It is now a truism – and also a cliché – to say that we live in a time of “disruptive” change. It’s a matter of conjecture how long we have lived in the disruption. Perhaps modernity has been disruptive for its duration, or perhaps we humans have been disruptive of the earth since our emergence as a species which, for better but often for worse, quickly made its presence felt everywhere in the geosphere.

Of today’s disruptions, in this book and its companion, Adding Sense, we will among other things explore some of the transformations in our modes of social participation in the digital era – investigating elements of a grammar of digital modernity. To set this in context, we will trace the ways in which earlier grammars of meaning have in their own time also been disruptive. We will also engage with human diversity as manifest in divergent practices of meaning-making. And we will ponder the confounding of each other’s meanings in societies of inequality. In each case, our focal interest is the nature of the social. The implications are not just descriptive-analytical, but ethical-political.

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¹ M.A.K. Halliday, 2000 [2002], “Grammar and Daily Life: Concurrence and Complementarity,” pp. 369–83 in On Grammar, The Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday, Volume 1, edited by J.J. Webster, London, UK: Continuum, pp. 369–70. A note on the dates of references: we’re incidentally interested in the history of ideas, so when there are twodates, the older is the date when the edition we are referencing was ﬁrst published and, if not in English, in its original language. The newer is the date of the edition we have at hand, for the purposes of page referencing.

² Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, 2009a, “A Grammarof Multimodality,” International Journalof Learning 16(2):361–425; Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, 2009b, “‘Multiliteracies’: New Literacies, New Learning,” Pedagogies: An International Journal 4:164–95; Mary Kalantzis, Bill Cope,Eveline Chan, and Leanne Dalley-Trim, 2016, Literacies(Edn 2), Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

³ Courtney B. Cazden, 2001, Classroom Discourse: The Language of Teaching and Learning, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann; Courtney Cazden, 2018, Communicative Competence, Classroom Interaction, and Educational Equity: The Selected Works of Courtney B. Cazden, New York, NY: Routledge.

⁴ Norman Fairclough, 1992, Discourse and Social Change, Cambridge UK: Polity Press; Norman Fairclough, 2001, Language and Power, London: Longmans.

⁵ James Paul Gee, 2017, “A Personal Retrospective on the New London Group and Its Formation,” pp.32–45 in RemixingMultiliteracies: Theory and Practice from New Londonto New Times, edited by F. Serﬁni and E. Gee, New York, NY: Teachers College Press; James Paul Gee, 1992 [2013], The Social Mind: Language, Ideology, and Social Practice, Champaign, IL: Common Ground; James Paul Gee, 1996, Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses, London, UK: Taylor and Francis.

⁶ Gunther Kress, 2009, Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication, London, UK: Routledge; Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, 2006, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, London, UK: Routledge.

⁷ Antero Garcia, Allan Luke, and Robyn Seglem, 2018, “Looking at the Next Twenty Years of Multiliteracies: A Discussion with Allan Luke,” Theory into Practice57(1):72–78; Allan Luke, 1996, “Text and Discourse in Education: An Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis,” Review of Research in Education 21:3–48.

⁸ Carmen Luke and JenniferGore, eds., 1992, Feminismsand Critical Pedagogy, New York, NY: Routledge; Carmen Luke, 2003, “Pedagogy, Connectivity, Multimodality, and Interdisciplinarity,” Reading Research Quarterly 38(3):397–403.

⁹ Sarah Michaels and RichardSohmer, 2000, “Narratives and Inscriptions: CultureTools, Power, and Powerful Sensemaking,” pp.267–88 in Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures, edited by B. Cope and M. Kalantzis, London, UK: Routledge; Richard Sohmer and Sarah Michaels, 2002, “Re-Seeing Science: The Role of Narratives in Mediating between Scientiﬁc and Everyday Understanding and Explanation,” pp.167–208 in Learning for the Future, edited by M. Kalantzis, G. Varnava-Skoura and B. Cope, Melbourne, AU: Common Ground.

¹⁰ Martin Nakata, 2000, “History, Cultural Diversity and English LanguageTeaching,” pp.106–20 in Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Designof Social Futures, edited by B. Cope and

M. Kalantzis, London, UK: Routledge; Martin Nakata, 2007, Disciplining the Savages: Savaging the Disciplines, Canberra, Australia: Aboriginal Studies Press.

¹¹ Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis, and Liam Magee, 2011, Towards a Semantic Web: Connecting Knowledge in Academic Research, Cambridge, UK: Elsevier; Bill Cope and Angus Phillips, eds., 2014, The Future of the Academic Journal, Oxford, UK: Elsevier.

¹² US Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences: “The Assess-as-You-Go Writing Assistant” (R305A090394); “Assessing Complex Performance” (R305B110008); “u-Learn.net: An Anywhere/Anytime Formative Assessment and Learning Feedback Environment”(ED-IES-10-C-0018); “The Learning Element” (ED-IES-lO-C-0021); and “InfoWriter: A Student Feedback and Formative Assessment Environment” (ED-IES-13-C-0039). Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: “Scholar Literacy Courseware.” National Science Foundation: “Assessing ‘Complex Epistemic Performance’ in Online Learning Environments” (Award 1629161).

¹³ Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope, 2012b,New Learning: Elements of a Scienceof Education (Edn2), Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press; Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope, 2016, “Learner Differences in Theory and Practice,” Open Review of Educational Research 3(1):85–132; Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, eds., 2017, E-Learning Ecologies: Principles for New Learning and Assessment, New York, NY: Routledge.

§MS0.0 Making Sense: An Overview