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Transpositional Grammar: The Main Ideas

0.0 MARY: The main ideas in our transpositional grammar are form and function. Forms are the things we do to make meaning. Functions are the kinds of meaning we make.

0.25 BILL: The forms of meaning are the ways in which meaning is made manifest. This is everything, the only ways meanings reach us as sentient creatures, as a particular species of animal. Of course, all animals make meaning in the sense they make their way around in the world – primates, for instance, and I am sure you know how smart your dogs and cats are. But insects even – think how smart ants and bees are in their elaborate societies.

Our list of forms of meaning is just a rough classification of the main ways our species has evolved to make meaning. This is what we mean by each.

1.01: Text consists of graphemes. There are two kinds of graphemes. One kind represents either phonemes, or speech sounds.

Another kind of grapheme is an ideograph, which represents an idea.

Today, there is just one universal catalogue of graphemes, and that is Unicode – we’ll be speaking about that later. This includes a hundred thousand plus characters, including thousands of emojis.

Image is two dimensional array represented on a surface, imaginary or real.

Space is three dimensional array.

Object is tangible three dimensional thing.

Body is sensuous feeling, enactments, gesticulations and appearances.

Sound is audible meaning – alerts, ambient sounds, music and such like.

Speech is a system of voiced sound.

These are systems of meaning.

Barely ever does one form meaning happen without one or more of the others, and always, we’re making transpositions from form to form as we mean. If one form is not enough, we supplement it with another in order to add sense.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 3-7.

2.50 MARY: If the forms are how meaning happens, then the functions are what meaning does. We say there are five functions, reference, agency, structure, context, and interest. All five of these things are always happening in every meaning, even if for the moment we may have our attention more focused on one function than another.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 9-13.

3.18 MARY: This translates into five questions we can ask about any meaning, every meaning, in any form, or any combination of forms.

What’s this about?

Reference

MARY:

Who or what is doing this?

Agency

MARY:

What holds this together?

Structure

MARY:

What else is this connected to?

Context

MARY:

What’s this for?

Interest

We call this is a functional grammar, because our focus is on what meaning does, its purposes. With these five functions, we want to develop a shared pattern language, able to explain how text, image, space, object, body, sound and speech work together to convey the same meanings.

To give you just one example from the first of these functions, “reference”, instead of “noun” and “verb” we want to use the terms “entity” and “action,” because these concepts are able to describe a distinction that can be made across all forms of meaning.

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. 4.

4.45 MARY: And by the way, Michael Halliday in his functional grammar focused on the first three of our functions, though he called them “metafunctions” rather than functions. What we now call “reference,” he called “ideational,” our “agency” he called “interpersonal,” and our “structure” he called “textual.”

But we have added two more that we call “context” and “interest.” Halliday spoke of context to, as did Ruqaiya Hasan at great length. They also spoke of purpose, which we have named “interest.” But these were things that sat outside of the grammar. We add them to the system because we believe they are essential and distinct aspects of meaning as a system.

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. 43-44.

5.38 MARY: Then, for any meaning, we can analyze what happens when form meets function. This is a way to parse, if you like, the patterns of meaning across all forms of meaning. In these videos, and two volumes and website that go with them, we go into a great deal of detail filling out the blank cells of this table, developing contributing concepts, bringing in other scholars who have thought about these and related ideas, and offering examples.

6.10 BILL: We’ve laid things out in what we call “supermarket order.” Most of the time, the things in a supermarket are only put in one place, alongside other things that it makes a kind of rough sense they should be near. It makes sense that you might ﬁnd the yoghurt somewhere near the milk. Less obviously perhaps, experience and instinct also tell you that you are more likely to ﬁnd the dishwashing detergent nearer the pet food than the milk. We get to know that some things more or less go together. We’ve arranged things in this rough kind of way in the grammar, not because they couldn’t be arranged differently, but because this order seems roughly right, for the moment at least.

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. 18-19.

6.56 BILL: So, here are some of the reasons we have put things where they are on our metaphorical supermarket shelf.

On the horizontal axis, text is essentially visual thing, graphemes laid out on a two dimensional plane, and two dimensional planes are often representations of space, or three dimensional planes. On the other hand, speech is materialized in sound, closely allied to bodily configurations, bodily appearances and gesticulations, which in turn are often sensuously juxtaposed with objects.

We have laid things out in this way because we want to show how very different speech is from text – so different, you will see, that we propose to abandon the concept of “language.” Language is a singularly unhelpful idea for a multimodal grammar because it conflates things that are so different. Of course, we can write down a spoken word, this is a multimodal transposition, but it is a transposition that is at least as great as any of the others across this horizontal array, and if anything, we will argue, greater.

8.09 BILL: Then, on the vertical axis, the things being referred to are very closely connected to their referrers, the agents in meaning. Structures in meanings (books, conversations, webpages, useful objects, buildings and such like) make sense by what surrounds them in context. Contexts make sense in terms of interest. Because all functions are present in any meaning, transposition is a change in our attentions. The referring often leads us to consider the referrer. The structure of a meaning often leads us to think of its boundaries with context, beyond the cover of the book, the moment of the conversation, the door leading out of a building. Then context often leads us to consider interest.

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. 42-43.

Transpositional Grammar: The Main Ideas