After language: A grammar of multiform transposition

This chapter suggests that we abandon “language” as a category for two reasons. The first is that meaning is never separable from multiform ensembles of text, image, space, object, body, sound, and speech. The second reason is that the concept of language aggregates text and speech, and these need to be considered as radically different, when text is closer in its form to image and space, and speech is closer to sound, body, and object. To account for the dynamics of multiform meaning, we propose a transpositional grammar, recognizing that meanings shift backwards and forwards across and between different forms, the one complementing the other for the peculiarities of its media—its affordances. Across all of these meaning-forms and within their multiform manifestations, any and every meaning expresses five meaning-functions: reference, agency, structure, context, and interest. In this functional perspective, meanings are always on the move, as we shift our attention from one meaning-function to another, and within each function where meanings are ever-ready and always-impatient to move. Transpositional grammar is an account of meanings that, in their very nature, are always in a process of transformation, form-to-form, and function-to-function.