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The one we want here, “a number or collection of things,” has 154 distinguishable sub-meanings.¹⁶⁴ Among other contributors needed to untangle the depths of this dictionary entry was Sanskrit scholar, Philip Wittington Jacob.¹⁶⁵

So far, we have stayed mostly within the bounds of repeatable relations. This is the basis of patterning, what makes for generalizable coherence in meanings across different structures. Adding to the complexity, across the forms of meaning, patterning by relations is achieved in quite different ways. Fig. 3.3 provides a rough map.

Fig. 3.3: Relations

Beyond the complexity, we encounter the impossibility of perfectly replicated relations. This is a consistency Chomsky would require if his grammar were to be either universal or generative, if words could be swapped out while leaving the syntax the same.

No two relations are the same. We can use “kind of,” “part of,” “property of,” and “cause of” as rough heuristics for relations. But muscles do not connect with bones in the same way that managers connect with clerks. An organization structure diagram might do for a bureaucracy, but it won’t for a body. This is because the structures and relations – meanings-in – are irreducibly different.

Now, our forms of meaning, our expression of meanings-for, may also lead us into error. Bodies are only ramshackle against the measure of one form of our representation of them: the textual genre of the spatialized list. In themselves, bodies might be perfectly ordered, in sickness as well as in health.

This irreducible specificity of relations is also the reason we need big lists of things, codified and the subject of general agreement in the digital era: the International Statistical Classification of Diseases,^§MS3.2a Unicode,^§MS0.2.1a GeoNames,^§AS1.3.2b Ethnologue,¹⁶⁶ Chemical Markup Language (ChemML),¹⁶⁷ Mathematical Markup Language (MathML)¹⁶⁸ – the list of lists in digital modernity is long, covering billions of the most useful and important things that can be meant. More meaning is to be found in the unique configurations of relations in these lists than can be found in purely algorithmic or logical work of so-called “artificial intelligence.”^§AS1.4.6c Here we find the grammar of everything, in its grounded specificity – well, nearly everything. These lists structure and refine the accumulated wisdom of human ages. Though of course, there is always more to be learned, and for this, the lists can be extended.

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¹⁵³ John R. Searle, 1972, “Chomsky’s Revolution in Linguistics,” New York Review of Books 18 (29 June):12–29.

¹⁵⁴ John R. Searle, 2002, “End of the Revolution,” New York Review of Books 49(3).

¹⁵⁵ http://apps.who.int/classifications/icd10/browse/2016/en : C50.

¹⁵⁶ http://apps.who.int/classifications/icd10/browse/2016/en : R01.0.

¹⁵⁷ Morton E. Winston, Roger Chaffin, and Douglas Herrmann, 1987, “A Taxonomy of Part–Whole Relations,” Cognitive Science 11:417–44.

¹⁵⁸ http://apps.who.int/classifications/icd10/browse/2016/en : S94.3.

¹⁵⁹ Judea Pearl, 2009, Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

¹⁶⁰ http://apps.who.int/classifications/icd10/browse/2016/en A37.0, A37.1.

¹⁶¹ M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, 1980, Text and Context: Aspects of Language in a Social Semiotic Perspective, Sophia University, pp. 74–95; M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, 1976, Cohesion in English, London, UK: Longman.

¹⁶² Samaa Haniya, Matthew Montebello, Bill Cope, and Richard Tapping, 2018, “Promoting Critical Clinical Thinking through E-Learning,” pp. 5008–17 in Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies (EduLearn18), Palma de Mallorca, Spain.

¹⁶³ Melanie Mitchell, 2009, Complexity: A Guided Tour, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press; Douglas R. Hofstadter, 1985, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern, New York, NY: Basic Books; Douglas R. Hofstadter, 2007, I Am a Strange Loop, New York, NY: Basic Books.

¹⁶⁴ Oxford English Dictionary (Edn 1), Volume 8, 1914, pp. 527–50.

¹⁶⁵ Simon Winchester, 2003, The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, p. 210.

¹⁶⁶ www.ethnologue.com

¹⁶⁷ www.xml-cml.org/documentation/index.html

¹⁶⁸ www.w3.org/Math/

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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. 307–310. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Relation §MS3.3