Abstract
Making Sense (MS) and its companion volume, Adding Sense (AS), is a grammar of multimodal meaning. In this grammar of multimodality, meaning is seen as part of our life in what we see, hear, understand or express. In terms of its mode of communication, Cope and Kalantzis hold that “meaning can manifest itself in seven forms: text, image, space, object, body, sound, and speech” and “every artifact of meaning always, inevitably, happens simultaneously in all five ways no matter what combinations of modes they are” (p. 8, MS). The five ways, also called the five meaning functions, are reference, agency, structure, context, and interest.
In the first volume the first three meaning functions are addressed in details. Part I focuses on reference. Reference refers to what something (text, speech, or image) is about. Part 2 talks about agency. Agency is related to who and what is doing something. Part 3 deals with structure. Structure refers to the networks of meaning interconnection that create coherence in text, image, space, object, body, sound, and speech (p. 195, MS). In the second volume Kalantzis and Cope argue that context and interest are also the constituent parts of meaning, not only in text and speech, but in image, sound, body, space, and object as well (p. 8, AS). Part 4 explores context. Context is about how meaning fits with its surroundings. Part 5 investigates interest. Interest is the purpose of meaning. In this grammar the authors’ premise is that the interests of participants in meaning are never simply overt due to their diverse social backgrounds and experiences (p. 139, AS). Therefore, interest is the different play of one’s ideology.
In this grammar of multimodality the authors propose that there are seven meaning forms that are operating simultaneously across five meaning functions. The three meaning functions presented in the first volume are roughly parallel to what Halliday (1978, 1994) calls “ideational”, “interpersonal,” and “textual” functions and the last two in the second volume relate to what Halliday speaks to as “situation” and “purpose” (p. 8, AS). But Halliday’s three metafunctions are only used to describe language. Context is outside of the metafunctions. Interest is the concerns of pragmatics by tradition. In this multimodal grammar, the authors don’t privilege language over other meaning forms; the concepts developed in this grammar can be applied to image, space, object, body, sound, speech, and text. Moreover, the authors elevate context and interest as full meaning functions and insist that they are always present, always integral to meaning, and always multimodal (p. 8, MS). But the most striking feature of this grammar lies in its “transposition”, a novel idea about the patterns in the movement of meaning emerging from digital communication. Based on these thoughts, the authors stretch the meaning of grammar to a wider sense and point out that the transpositional nature of this grammar is its multimodality.
In these two paired books, instead of using the traditional static understandings of grammar as the lexis and syntax of language, the authors have expanded the definition of grammar and developed a new functional theory of meaning that can be applied across all forms of meaning or a multimodal combination of them. The contributions are as follows.
The grammar of multimodality follows the Hallidayan tradition to probe into the possibilities of multimodal meaning in digital communication, but it has gone beyond the conventional frames of linguistics and language-centered theories of meaning. It is the first systematic framework for describing and analyzing different forms of meaning across text, image, space, object, body, sound, and speech.
The grammar of multimodality stays with Halliday’s notion of metafunction for language, but it has broken through the account of traditional grammar and upgraded context and interest to full meaning functions. In addressing the five meaning functions, a more general and simple alternative pattern has been provided to cover all forms of meaning. Compared with traditional grammars of language, this grammar is a more widely encompassing theoretical framework which can talk about meaning at a broader level of generality.
The grammar of multimodality can explain the mobility of meaning. Unlike the traditional approach to discourse analysis, this grammar does not freeze a meaning in time and place, but traces and describes the patterns of movement in meaning across all meaning forms, which is the principal innovation of this grammar since meanings are constantly on the move in current digital and multimodal communicative surroundings. This is the reason why this grammar is also called “Transpositional Grammar.”
In these two companion books the authors aim to create a conceptual framework with which to account for meaning crossing disciplines such as semiotics, linguistics and some other social sciences. They also hope to propose a shared framework with which to help answer the questions of how to analyze meaning at the times when the phenomenon of multimodality has become central in people’s interaction. The theoretical framework provided is a powerful tool not only for educators designing their online teaching, but also for designers generalizing their knowledge in the fields of architecture, media, or communication because they make patterns of meaning in space or on screens every day. On the whole, these are two excellent books that have innovatively inherited and developed the functional theory of meaning in contemporary communication. For readers who enjoy reading grand historical books rather than plain academic ones, they would find the two books engaging because the authors have conversations with key theorists or great thinkers with great familiarity and parse diverse multimodal practices every now and then. However, for those who only want to apply the theory to multimodal discourse analysis, it is possible that they would expect to see more specific examples of parsing included for practice in the appendix or the support materials offered online accompanying the two books.
To conclude, the grammar of multimodality created in the two books describes and analyzes the patterns of meaning in multimodal communication. It is a new social semiotic theory of meaning which can account for broader meaning-making activities across a range of disciplines in the times of digital technology and multi-media. It stimulates new thinking about the nature of meaning. To mean is also to act. And to parse is in order to change. Therefore, the implications of these two companion books are significant since the purpose of parsing is to make sense of the play of solidarity and antagonistic interests in our social lives. As the authors say at the beginning of these two books, the grammar of multimodality is not just a grammar to parse sentences, but one “to parse a world beyond the text” (p. 1, MS).