ql-align-right">M.A.K. Halliday.¹

We started the companion volume to this book, Making Sense, with this quote from Michael Halliday. We start again with this quote because, for grammar to be a theory of human experience and to embody a theory of everyday life, it needs to go beyond the conventional frames of linguistics and language-centered theories of meaning. We want to agree with Halliday. We also want to create an account of meaning that is as good as his word.

Making Sense addressed three meaning functions – reference, agency, and structure – in terms roughly parallel to Halliday’s three “metafunctions,” ideational, interpersonal, and textual.^§MS0.3a This volume “adds sense” by exploring two additional functions that we call “context” and “interest.”

Halliday speaks to “situation” and “purpose,” which might be considered roughly parallel to our context and interest. However, although they are an important part of his account of language, for him they sit outside of the meaning of a written text or a spoken utterance. They are around his system, helping to explain it, but not in it. In this book we elevate context and interest to full meaning functions – always present, always integral to meaning, always multimodal.

In the “transpositional grammar” that we develop in these two volumes, the following five functions can always be found in any meaning. Making Sense addressed the first three. Now Adding Sense addresses the last two.

The concepts we develop for each function are at a sufficient level of generality to be applied across all forms of meaning, not just text and speech.

As for “transposition,” we refer to two vectors of changeability, differences that can be made in the ways meanings are expressed. The first is meaning form. The same things can be meant in the forms of text, image, space, object, body, sound, and speech. But whenever they are meant in a different form, the meaning is never quite the same. This is why we refer to multimodality, one meaning form supplementing another.

The second dimension of transposition is meaning function. All five are always present, but we can for moments turn the focus of our attention to meaning in terms of one of the five functions or another. These are always-possible, alternative orientations to meaning. Then, within each function, meanings are constantly on the move. There is no categorical fixity to meaning. There are no stable structures. This, however, does not prevent us from creating an account of the patterning. Rather, the account must explain movability. Function is process.

A note on who this book is for. Theoretically, this book and its companion volume aim to create a framework with which to account for meaning that crosses the disciplinary paradigms of semiotics, linguistics (mainly pragmatics), the sociology of action, cultural and media studies, philosophy (ontology), and computer science (ontology again, or data structures). We hope that it will provide a framework by means of which a range of practitioners can work together, sharing a common conceptual framework across education, communications, media, architecture, the arts, design, computing, and more.

These disciplines and their related work practices have their own distinctive but mostly separate frameworks for understanding their respective domains of action. But all deal in their daily practices with meanings in their profound multimodality. The challenge we have set ourselves in this pair of books is to develop a more widely encompassing framework, able to extend, even in modest ways, these repertoires of theory and practice – to “add sense,” if you will.

Along the way, we bring into the conversation key thinkers across these disciplines, so addressing the patterning of meaning in a cross-disciplinary way. Our perspective traverses a range of cultures and historical moments. Casting the intellectual net widely, we contend, can generate new insights. We also analyze the affordances of digital as well as legacy media in representation and communication, and their peculiar scope for meaning and action. In these respects, this book has a somewhat encyclopedic quality.

Fig. 0: Meaning and its functions

Some practical notes about the reading of this book: when an idea or person is discussed in more detail elsewhere in this or the companion volume, we include a cross-reference marker like this.^§AS0.0 We hope this will support the different interests of readers, and non-linear readings.

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¹ M.A.K Halliday, 2000 [2002], “Grammar and Daily Life: Concurrence and Complementarity,” pp. 369–83 in On Grammar, The Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday, Volume 1, edited by J.J. Webster, London: Continuum, pp. 369–70. A note on the dates of references: we’re incidentally interested in the history of ideas, so when there are two dates, the older is the date when the edition we are referencing was first published and, if not in English, in its original language. The newer is the date of the edition we have at hand, for the purposes of page referencing.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Meaning §AS0.0