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Fig. 1.3(i): Properties specified

Conventional accounts of language do not make a quantity/quality distinction grammatically, to the extent that numbers are mere adjectives (categorically, “seven” is the same part of speech as “red”), or inadequately to the extent that the plural form is an undifferentiated more-than-one.

Until the past several thousand years, human societies have not needed a finely grained sense of quantity. The social practice of extensive quantification commences with the invention of human inequality. Both quantification and inequality have intensified since the coming of industrial modernity, and this can be no coincidence.^§AS1.4.7a

Since the third quarter of the twentieth century, quantification has come to be mediated by now-universal technologies of digitization. Until these relatively recent historical events, the human species had no need for a distinguishable system of quantities. We do today, and with a new urgency in the digital era where by processes of functional transposition, numbers denote instances, concepts, and properties – and do so with an insistent practical import for the mechanics of representation and communication, and near-universal agreement as to the objects of their reference.

With this change in our systems of sense-making comes (another) self-transformation of human nature, perhaps for the worse, perhaps for the better – there is no essential directionality in the tools of human self-transformation. It may be that we are creatures of history; we nevertheless remain responsible for the direction of our continuous self-making, our designs on ourselves, and our impacts on others.

So, to distinguish these two kinds of property, quality refers to everyday, viscerally ordinary experiences such as light, sound, and touch; and quantities refer to their enumeration – their numbered naming in an instance, their enumeration in concept classification, or numbering that adds specificity to the vagaries of speech in the specification of properties by their degree.

We manage both qualities and quantities across modes. In writing and speech, adjectives refer to the properties of entities and adverbs to the properties of action. In image, line and color refer to the properties of entities, and vectors to the properties of visible actions. In space, the properties of entities may be determined by the material form of structure, and the qualities of their use in spatially defined action.

Fig. 1.3(ii) provides a rough map of properties in a grammar of multimodality, with some examples:

Fig. 1.3(ii): Properties

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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. 135-137. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Property §MS1.3