https://d2ng68cf36kxsk.cloudfront.net/store/public/post/849/post_images/Slide253.JPG">

In several books and numerous articles published in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, Welby makes the case that language itself is by no means the exclusive seat of meaning. Indeed, if we stop our analysis at language, as if to assume that it captures the full scope of human meaning, we would miss some of language’s inadequacies, deceptions even. “The form of expression called linguistic, our phrase and our word spoken or written, betrays us daily more disastrously, and atrophies alike action and thought.”²

So Welby creates a three-cornered semiotic, a triad of: sense ⬄ meaning ⬄ significance.

Sense. A better word, says Welby, is “sensal.” Not only in language, “realities, verities, actual facts may be set forth pictorially … Or they may be given in action, being lived or acted in outward conduct, thus impressing present spectators, hearers, touchers, with the sensuous conviction of their reality.” For “our organism is a plexus of energies, intimately related to that ‘environment’ which we call the material or physical world … [or] what is usually called experience. We are fully ‘in touch’ … with the world we live on … ‘Sense’ … becomes the fitting term for that which makes the value of ‘experience’ in this life on this planet.’” Nor is this an exclusively human ground of meaning. “The whole ‘animal kingdom’ (if not the plant order) shares the sense-world.”³ Or, in the terms we have been developing in this grammar, the ground of meaning is multimodal experience.

Meaning. This is the expression of the immediate “intention of the user,” and such “Expression [may come in the form of] action or sound, symbol or picture.” Here Welby wants to emphasize “the power of symbol not only in Word, as in legend, narrative, parable, name, and all social speech and all intellectual discussions; but also, in act, as in ritual, ceremony, performance, posture, dance.” This is to rectify an absence in hitherto existing analyses and theories of meaning. “There has been as yet no adequate, no thorough, no logical and scientific attempt on the widest basis to deal with this central interest of man’s expression and realisation of himself and the world through Symbol.”⁴

Significance. If meaning is localized, significance is broader and deeper meaning – meaning in a wider context. “For a thing is significant … in proportion as it is expressible through bare sign or pictorial symbol or representative action … It is [also] significant in proportion as it is capable of expressing itself in, or being translated into, more and more phases of thought or branches of science. The more varied and richer our employment of signs, the greater our power of … inter-translating … and coming closer to the nature of things …, for the acquisition of fresh knowledge, new truth.”⁵ As a consequence, “Significance is always manifold, and intensifies its sense as well as its meaning, by expressing … its universal or at least social range … Why do we value experience? … Because we are the Expression of the world, as it were ‘expressed from’ it by the commanding or insistent pressure of natural stimulae.”

Welby called this new science of meaning, “significs,” claiming for it “a new departure in philosophy and psychology.”⁶ Significs demands we put an end to “the old antithesis, ‘matter and mind’.”⁷

Man … must learn to signify … He must discover, observe, analyse, appraise first the sense of all that he senses through touch, hearing, sight, and to realize its interest, what it practically signifies for him … Thus at last he will see the Significance, the ultimate bearing, the central value, the vital implication – of what? of all experience, all fact, and all thought.⁸

Live in Me; learn and know Me, saith all that is Real.⁹

In the terms we have been developing in this grammar, Welby’s “sense” is more or less our reference; “meaning,” more or less our agency and structure; “significance,” more or less our context and interest; and “inter-translation,” more or less our notion of transposition.

---

¹ V. Welby, 1897, “A Royal Slave,” Fortnightly Review 62:432–34.

² V. Welby, 1911, Significs and Language: The Articulate Form of Our Expressive and Interpretative Resources, London: Macmillan, p. 6.

³ V. Welby, 1903, What Is Meaning? Studies in the Development of Meaning, London: Macmillan, pp. 12–13, 120, 27–28.

⁴ V. Welby, 1911, Significs and Language: The Articulate Form of Our Expressive and Interpretative Resources, London: Macmillan, pp. 11, 9, 41.

⁵ V. Welby, 1903, What Is Meaning? Studies in the Development of Meaning, London: Macmillan, pp. 5–6, 150.

⁶ Ibid., pp. 23, 251.

⁷ Ibid., pp. 50, 95–6, 110.

⁸ Ibid., p. 6.

⁹ V. Welby, 1911, Significs and Language: The Articulate Form of Our Expressive and Interpretative Resources, London: Macmillan, p. 93.

---

Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 22–24. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

V. Welby’s What is Meaning? §AS1.0a