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On Grammar

0.00 MARY: Hello, and welcome to this series of videos. Grammar sounds like a boring thing to be doing, perhaps even a waste of time. If you’re thinking that, it’s probably because you have an old idea of grammar in your mind, one that you might have got from school – parsing nouns, and verbs, and clauses, and sentences, then some rules about how to write correctly, all that stuff we had to learn off by heart at school. Forget about that, I can imagine you saying, let’s just read and write. We don’t really need it. And this is just what some literacy educators said in the second half of the twentieth century, just immerse learners in good books, get them started with that, and to write freely without the constraints of traditional grammar. In this series of videos we are going to introduce you to a more expansive view of grammar, one which is more useful to the everyday business of meaning-making.

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 56-58.

1.22 BILL: What do we mean by grammar? We have a straightforward definition – grammar is the patterns in meaning, and the business of doing grammar is making sense of these patterns. But why…? Can’t we just go about our everyday lives, meaning as we do, without having to reflect on the meanings of meanings? Of course we can, but there are many places where it is efficient and productive to reflect on our meanings. Professionals do this all the time – web designers, architects, photographers, doctors, writers, and videographers all develop specialist languages to speak about the meanings they are making on screens, in spaces, in the taking of their images, or in medical notes they write about bodies, in the reports they are writing, in the videos they are making, just to give a few examples. Also, teachers do it because it is how they generalize about patterns of meaning in the world, understandings that their learners can be transfer from the classroom or the online course to the world. We often need to speak in pattern languages if you like… so what we mean by grammar, is that it is a pattern language to describe the meanings we make.

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, p. 33.

2.42 MARY: Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan are perhaps our greatest influences is creating the grammar we are about to outline for you. Here is what Michael Halliday has to say about grammar…

“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.”

So here is a sentence: “I am walking towards Bill.” Nouns and verbs, subject and object, even using these old-fashioned grammar terms, we learn about patterns in meaning. Inspired by Halliday and Hasan, we want to expand the theory of experience to cover more than language - which we need to do particularly today because so much of our making meaning is with digital tools and what we call “multimodal.” I might be walking towards Bill in a video. I might be walking towards Bill in an architected space such as a shop where the pattern of my potential walking has been anticipated in its design. Or I might be on the phone, telling a third person where I am going, and expecting that they look out for me. Or my walking may be tracked by the GPS in my phone. What is the same and different about these meanings? We want to develop a general way to describe these meanings, one that may perhaps help educators, videographers, architects and computer scientists to talk to each other.

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, p. 1.

4.30 BILL: We’re call the pattern language we have developed a “transpositional grammar.” We mean several things by this, but the first is that we can mean the same thing in different ways. We call these different forms of meaning. Text or writing is one form. Speech is another. Image, space, object, body and sound are still others. Transposition is the movement between one form of meaning and another. Meaning is always an act of transposition, a journey from one form to another – writing something down that we have experienced, making an object from a drawing, gesturing to something, moving about in a space to get something done. Our aim in this transpositional grammar is to describe the ways in which we make these moves.

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 2-4.