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Fig. 0.4.1a(i): Five questions about meaning

Meaning always, inevitably, happens in all five ways simultaneously. Ask these questions of what you will – of printed words, images on screens, buildings or open spaces, objects, bodily gestures, sounds, or spoken utterances. No matter what the form of meaning (text, image, space, object, body, sound, speech), these five questions are always askable, always answerable.

First to the multimodality of forms.^§AS0.1 We often put forms of meaning together – text with image, speech with body, sound with space, for instance. Not only is this a matter of convenience. Much of the time it is impossible not to do. How could you do science without image? How could in-person conversation be without bodies? How could you do buildings without objects? The different forms of meaning go together. They rely on each other. This is why we need a multimodal grammar. In fact, this is reason enough to say that separated scholarly practices such as linguistics, visual communication, architecture, medicine, music, and such like, along with focused insight, bring narrowness of sense, even systematic occlusion.

However, we want to add another element to the theory of multimodality – not only do the forms of meaning go with each other in our daily practices of meaning. The forms of meaning are always ready to become each other.

So, to the word transposition, the main idea of this book, and why we are calling this a “transpositional grammar.” We can mean something in text, image, space, object, sound, or speech. And we can always swap out the way we mean. Everything can be meant any which way, though the meaning is never quite the same because of the humdrum materiality of each of the forms – its scope for meaning, its distinctive affordances. The mundane materialities of the different forms of meaning both open and constrain possibilities for meaning. Transposition is how we are always able, and why we are always ready, to swap out one form of meaning for another, as well as to supplement one form of meaning with another, even when this is at the expense of some amount of redundancy. Transposition of meaning-form presents itself as an ever-present readiness.

And to this we will add a second dimension of transposition, of meaning-function.^§AS0.2 This is what we address in the five questions about meaning. We are suggesting that these questions, these five functions of meaning, are always there, if we care to look. They are five universals. The five functions are integrally with each other, in each other. However, in a practical sense, when we parse, it’s best to examine each independently before connecting them. The five functions are perspectives on meaning. The transposition happens by changing the focus of one’s meaning-attention.

After this, the idea of transposition becomes all-the-more relevant within each of the functions. In each of the five functions, one kind of meaning is always ready to become another. Nothing is categorically straightforward because, in a flash, there can be functional transposition: a third person by empathy becomes a first; a concept is instantiated; time becomes place; entities act and actions become manifest in entities. These are several of the transpositions we explore in the pages that follow. Within each meaning function, one kind of meaning is always impatiently wanting to slip over into another.

Gone now are the categorical stabilities of traditional grammars, because the key to meaning is in the immediate possibility of movement. Transposability is imminent because it is immanent.

Finally, design. Where nothing sensible is stable, every sense is in the (re)making and nothing is replicated without change. But for all the newness, every meaning has a history, which means that we can always trace sources, though they be heterogeneous. The historical work of finding patterns and tracing their origins, we say, is “to parse.”^§AS2.5.1

In anticipation of our parsing, Fig. 0.4.1a(ii) provides an overview of where we will be travelling for the rest of this book (the first three functions), and its companion, Adding Sense (the final two):

Fig. 0.4.1a(ii): A transpositional grammar

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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. 72-75. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

To Parse §MS0.4.2