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Fig. 0.3: Matrix for a transpositional grammar

In this book and its companion volume, we’ll fill out the blank cells in this matrix with extended definitions, related thinking, and a range of examples. In so doing, we aim to outline a conceptual framework that accounts for the creation and reception of meaning across all forms. We aim to do this with the same rigor and practical applicability as already well-elaborated linguistic accounts of speech and text, but at a more broadly encompassing level of generality.

However, our most important theme is not what we can put into each of the cells of this matrix, but the transpositions – in this visualization, the horizontal movements across and between forms of meaning, and the vertical shifts of attention across and between functions of meaning.

More than this, the rigid spatiality of a table deceives, because forms are much of the time layered over each other, and all five functions are always present, even though for practical purposes we may choose to attend to just one function at a time. Nor can meaning be neatly put away in a cell of the matrix, because if it is not already somewhere else at the same time, it is begging to go there.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 42-43. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Meaning Function §0.3