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In much of the literature, multimodality is evidenced in things, artifacts of meaning that can be parsed for their amalgam of modes – text and image in a captioned picture, a web page as it appears on a screen, a gesture that accompanies speech, and any number of such found objects in the museum of human meanings. Mode is a state, presented in an analysis of how objects are ordered, and frozen for the moment of their analysis. Transposition, by contrast, is a process, how a meaning came to be and what it could soon become.

Rarely in the multimodality literature do we find accounts of movement, how one meaning has become another and why, at any moment, it could move again. Helpfully, Gunther Kress has a concept for movement that he calls “transduction.”³⁴ Denise Newfield speaks of “transmodal translation.”³⁵ Hartmut Stöckl speaks to the “transcription” of meaning from one mode to another.³⁶ Jay Lemke analyzes “transmedia transversals.”³⁷ We use the concept of synesthesia,^§MS0.2.9 as does Kress, in order to align multimodality with movement of meanings across senses. But such acknowledgments of movement are the exception rather than the rule.

Refining and extending these nascent ideas, we develop a notion of “transposition” that works across dimensions of form and function, albeit differently along each dimension. Across the form dimension, meaning functions are parallel. Anything and everything can be represented or communicated in every meaning form according to the functions reference, agency, structure, context, and interest. Function is a way to track parallels across forms. Such tracking will find that meanings can be more or less the same, but never quite. Different forms of meaning offer specific opportunities to mean, as well as constraints, and these can be traced back to the materiality of their media. Moving form-to-form entails gains as well as losses in meaning. This is why we are every-ready to transpose a meaning across different forms, even if that brings with it some redundancy. The purpose of transposition is to supplement meaning across forms.

Transposition across the function dimension has a somewhat different dynamic. Traversing the five functions, transposition becomes a matter of shifting attention because all are always present. We can focus on each function as an alternative orientation to a meaning. In one moment we may attend to the function of a meaning as reference to things or happenings, in another to the play of agency, in another to the relations by means of which it coheres, in another to its meaning in relation to its surrounds, and in another to its reason as an expression of interest.

But then, within a function, a meaning is only where it is momentarily because it has moved to be there, and it is always ready to move again. Movement is imminent because movability is immanent. Here are just a few of the functional transpositions that we explore across this grammar: between single instance and its countable concept;^§MS1.1 between actions and entities;^§MS1.2 between qualities and their quantitative measurement and alphanumeric naming;^§MS1.3 between self and other;^§MS2.2 between representation and communication;^§AS1.2 and between reified meaning^§AS2.3 and its rhetorical expression..^§AS2.1

So, we reject static or deterministic functionalisms that are the basis of studies of language stretching from Saussure to Chomsky – and now also, we fear, extending into a good deal of the newer literature on multimodality. We do not want to formalize structures of meaning into categorical objects, frozen for the moment of analysis. Rather, we are interested in the patterns of their becoming, what they have been and what they are begging yet to become.

Transposition is a likelihood, an impatience, a risk, a danger, a possibility, an opportunity, an impossibility, a shock, a hell, a utopia. Hence: design is a process of meaning; and meaning is a matter of social history at both a micro level (us, now, in this moment) and a macro level (natural and species history). To the extent that transposition is patterning, it is itself a structuralism but of a different kind, driven by social process and history across many scales.

The primary organizing principle for this pair of books is meaning function and its transposabilities. Secondarily, we look at transpositions across meaning form. Here, by way of retrospect and anticipation, is our map of meaning functions, the first three of which we analyzed in Making Sense. The remaining two of which we now explore in Adding Sense.

Fig. 0.4: A transpositional grammar

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³⁴ Gunther Kress, 2003, Literacy in the New Media Age, London: Routledge, p. 151; Katharine Cowan and Gunther Kress, 2019, “Documenting and Transferring Meaning in the Multimodal World: Reconsidering ‘Transcription’,” pp. 66–77 in Remixing Multiliteracies: Theory and Practice from New London to New Times, edited by F. Serfini and E. Gee, New York: Teachers College Press.

³⁵ Denise Newfield, 2014, “Transformation, Transduction and the Transmodal Moment,” pp. 100–13 in The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis, edited by C. Jewitt, London: Routledge, p. 103.

³⁶ Hartmut Stöckl, 2009, “The Language-Image-Text: Theoretical and Analytical Inroads into Semiotic Complexity,” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 34(2):203–26, p. 205.

³⁷ Jay Lemke, 2009, “Multimodal Genres and Transmedia Traversals: Social Semiotics and the Political Economy of the Sign,” Semiotica 173(1):283–97.

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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. 15–19. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Transposition §AS0.4