Interview with Gunther Kress

By fredrik lindstrand

DESIGNS FOR LEARNING / VOLUME 1 / NUMBER 2 / DECEMBER 2008

Interview with Gunther Kress in transformational grammar. It assumed that you would generate a syntactic
structure – speech and writing weren´t distinguished – and a kind of semantics
was grafted on to that. And that seemed to me implausible. Halliday’s model
By fredrik lindstrand by contrast started immediately from the assumption that there is a system of
meaning-choices from which you select. The choices were seen (and laid out)
This issue of Designs for Learning features an interview with professor Gunther Kress. Our as a complex interrelated meaning-potential, offering choices about repre-
intention here is to give some further insights regarding interests and influences that form senting social relation between me and you; about ‘goings on’ in the world;
a background to his theoretical work on social semiotics, multimodality and learning theory. and the means which would make the whole thing a text. That started with
meaning and went from there to form; to me it seemed an absolutely plausible
Gunther Kress is professor of semiotics at the Institute of Education, University way of thinking about language and meaning. It didn´t offer an articulated
of London. He has been prominent in the development of social semiotics sense of speakers located in social structures; but it did have a clear notion of
and multimodality since the 1970’s and has written extensively within this field. “I´m in the social world, I want to do certain things, here is a resource for what
Among his latter publications are Literacy in the New Media Age (2003), Multi- I want to do”. And so I became a Hallidayan. It seemed plausible to me, a
modal Discourse (with Theo van Leeuwen, 2001) and Multimodal teaching and strong sense of “yes, this was the way to think about it.”
learning: the rhetorics of the science classroom (with Carey Jewitt et al., 2001). In I did a post-graduate degree with Michael Halliday; and enrolled to do a
2009 his new book Multimodality. A social semiotic approach to communication will PhD with him, on ‘theme’. Unfortunately, he left London; I changed jobs,
be published. going from the university of Kent to the university of East Anglia in Norwich.
That’s where I met up with Bob Hodge, who arrived a year after I did. We
FL: Since many of our readers are acquainted with, and interested in, your taught a regular joint seminar in literature and linguistics, within a kind of
work within social semiotics and multimodality, it would be interesting to hear overarching theoretical frame of Marx and Freud and Whorf and Halliday –
a little about your background – where you started theoretically and academi- and to a lesser extent Chomsky through a realist notion of transformation.
cally and what led you further towards the development of these theories. It Our conception of Marxism was a version of social and economic base produ-
would also be interesting to hear a little about the relationship between your cing superstructural categories such as law, literature; and if you translated
ideas and other things that circulated at that time or that you had immediately that to language as a superstructural category, you would see that the shape of
around you. the language was related to the social and economic base. So English, for in-
stance, has particular kinds of possessive forms; these might be an effect of an
GK: Well, my first degree was in English literature and as a part of that I did a orientation to ‘possession’ peculiar to English society in some way. That tea-
course on language. In Australia that was a four year degree, where, in the ching led to what became Language as Ideology (Hodge & Kress, 1979/1993).
fourth year, you would specialize. I specialized in language which, among We were quite clear that we wanted our theorizing to have a social effect and
other things, meant getting introduced to transformational grammar. So my so the notion of critical linguistics emerged. That was about making linguistics
teacher and I read Syntactic Structures (Chomsky, 1957), Chomsky's first book, socially responsive; to produce a linguistics with social effects, through revea-
line by line literally, sentence by sentence. I read papers which were coming ling the structures of power in language use. That was the project of critical
out – mimeographs!! – from MIT. And, feeling not particularly happy with linguistics; which had its part in the development of the project of critical dis-
what I thought was a lack of rigour in literary studies and thinking that the course analysis: to try and change things by revealing how power worked in re-
study of linguistics would supply the rigour needed in literary theory, I decided presentation.
to do linguistics. That coincided with a move, after finishing my degree, from Bob Hodge went to Australia in 1976; but just before he went we said “well
Australia to (Germany for one year and) England, to a job as a Research Fel- we've done this thing on language; but really, meaning rests in many more
low in Applied Linguistics, at the University of Kent. And after a short while I things than language” and we said “we must do something more. We’ll look
started a postgraduate degree, part-time, with Michael Halliday, commuting at all these other ways in which meaning is made.” Well, it was difficult to work
up to London twice a week. between England and Australia; but in 1978 I too returned to Australia. He was
I had been quite unhappy about the way syntax and meaning was separated in Perth and I moved to Adelaide and now the distance wasn't 12000 miles

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DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.16993/dfl.14
but only 3000. Then I moved to Sydney. We kept on meeting and working in- over from Saussure - we said signs are made and signs, therefore, are always
termittently and we thought “what should this thing be called?” We played newly made. And that's more or less where we left it. We also developed ideas
around with possible titles but in the end it was Halliday’s phrase of (language of how all this hangs together as text; we developed the term logonomic system
as) ‘a social semiotic’ which seemed best for our purposes (Halliday, 1978). We which links genres with discourses, provides rules for ‘reading’ texts, and so
felt we wanted to explore, to describe all that was part of a social semiotic. And on. In a sense that left a still unfinished project, namely to ask “how do we
from Halliday’s conception - that there is somebody who chooses from the take this further? How is sculpture like a spoken utterance?”
meaning potential - we took the (there relatively implicit) notion of the signi- In the meantime I continued teaching linguistics, including Hallidayan
ficant action of the agent who makes choices from the meaning potential: the linguistics. I was particularly interested in his (implicit) notion of the materia-
agency which insists that you make meaning from existing resources. We took lity of resources and their social shaping – maybe because I had become inte-
on the idea that meaning is made – expressed, for instance, in another of his rested in children’s speech (as all linguists had to be, then) and then the
book-titles Learning how to mean (Halliday, 1975). transition for them, to writing (which had not really been a focus for linguis-
In East Anglia I taught transformational grammar for the seven years I was tics). It struck me that Halliday’s work on speech showed that we really needed
there. In the late sixties and early seventies there was a big debate whether to distinguish between writing and speaking; it was his insistence on the ma-
transformations were ‘meaning preserving’ or not. Chomsky had said that teriality of the voice, the physiology of breathing, which showed the relation
deep structure has all the meanings of the utterance. That then is transfor- of material, social working and culture. In breathing out, you exhale, say, five
med, though these transformations have no effect on meaning. So, in a sense, litres of air. You can measure the time this lasts, and establish a kind of average.
he said the passive sentence has the same meaning as the active sentence. That The expulsion of air, rather than the taking in of air, is the useful bit for spe-
seemed implausible to both of us. If you do something then something chan- ech, in most languages. And with that useful bit of air you do the talking. The
ges; there is an effect. We took the concept of transformations but as opera- exhaled breath becomes a linguistic unit, a unit marked by intonation; and it
tions which had effects on meaning. And so we married Halliday with becomes a semiotic unit, a unit that carries information: an information unit.
Chomsky; which wasn't at all permitted at that time. But in Language as Ideology Intonation can be used to distribute information in different ways. You can
we did that; for instance, we introduced the notion of ‘nominalisation’ from see how the natural phenomenon, the expelling of breath, becomes the se-
Chomsky’s work – the process that changes a simple sentence into a nominal; miotic entity of information unit, through the use of pitch variation, also a
and we attempted to explore what meaning consequences that had. We did natural phenomenon shaped by social use, as intonation.
the same for many transformations – passivization, agent-deletion; relative So the notion of the materiality of the resource and its social shaping into
clause formation; etc. And in each case we were interested in the ideological semiotic use in culture is there – somewhat implicitly - in Halliday's work on
effects: whose power was at work, for whose benefit. speech. That kind of stayed with me and it pointed me towards the need to dis-
When we wrote Social Semiotics (Hodge & Kress, 1988) we took the notion tinguish between different modes. Because writing, materially, hasn't got bre-
of agency, power and representation developed in the theory of Language as ath, it hasn't got intonation and all the things that rely on sound in speech. So
Ideology as the agency of anyone who makes any kind of sign. But this was more if we want to mean broadly the same or similar things in speech and writing,
than just a choosing from existing resources; it was actively making signs. The the meaning has to be made by different resources, in writing, word order,
person who chooses to use the transformations of passivization and agent-de- for instance. So that was for me the start of thinking about the notion of ma-
letion to turn ‘The police shot the demonstrators’ into ‘the demonstrators teriality and mode, though I did not use those terms then. In Learning to Write
were shot by the police’ and then into ‘the demonstrators were shot’ has made (Kress, 1982/1994), I thought about the real difficulties that children have in
a sign. I had written something in 1977 on the non-arbitrariness of signs, but learning to write as analogous to the difficulties of someone learning another
it now became the idea that signs are made and motivated; so agency was in the language; now I would express that difficulty in terms of the different affordan-
making of signs. The sign and the meanings that a sign-maker makes are an ces of the modes of speech and writing: some things similar and many things
expression of their disposition, habitus, identity – of their interest. quite different.
We applied that understanding to lots of things – sculptures, photographs, Because I had looked at lots of things that children had written at early
children’s drawings, pages from books, newspapers and so on. It was a social stages of learning to write and noticed – difficult not to notice – that they are
semiotics. Unlike existing semiotics which says signs are used – a notion taken always accompanied by drawings; and then you can say, because you're a

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‘linguist’, “drawings don't interest me”. You wouldn't say that as a father. As a FL: To stick with the background for another while and use the term motiva-
budding semiotician you might say "well there is something here that I can’t tion, can you see anything from your personal life that influenced the direc-
account for; let me think how I could”. And so that became a nagging issue for tion you headed in theoretically?
me. In Social Semiotics we didn't talk about modes, so that questions about the
semiotic regularities of these other means of making meaning were not in the GK: Well, in Learning to Write, I used the theory of Language as Ideology, which
forefront of our thinking. added, as I said, some central Chomskian terms into a basically Hallidayan
Social Semiotics, the book, was more or less written, by 1986. In 1986, Theo framework. The Chomskian theme I took came out of his theory of language
van Leeuwen and I decided that we would set aside one morning a week to development – you know, his notion that we have an innate disposition to lan-
start thinking about images. He was living just a few hundred yards from where guage and an innate structure which is developed by each individual in rela-
we lived, in an inner city suburb in Sydney. At seven in the morning he would tion to the mess of language. So the child comes with its innate structures,
come to the house and we'd drive off to a beach on the harbour, we had a encounters the mess of ordinary social life and of language and attempts to
swim and on the way back we'd pick up some patisserie and have breakfast in make regularities
our small inner city garden, with my partner, before she went off to work; and And so at each stage when you look at a child's speech, the child has de-
we then turned to our work. I can remember the moment we started, sitting veloped structures which are regular - a kind of a grammar, an account of re-
in the garden, saying “what do we need?” and “let’s look at some women's ma- gularities of how she or he uses language; these change as the child continually
gazines”. I went into the house and got a copy of Australian Women’s Weekly. realises that this regularity doesn't account for these other bits. For me what
Literally that. It was a method Bob Hodge and I had developed in our joint tea- was crucial in this is that it says, here, actually, is somebody who attempts to
ching: take any book on the course – it was a course on 17th century literature theorize about the complexities of the world. And, really, this is what I took
– open it and go for it; a make or break method: either the theory works or it from Chomsky: not the innateness bit, but saying "okay, we cannot ignore the
doesn't. We had a class of about 20 people and there we all were. We'd take a efforts of somebody who is a practicing theoretician, constantly revising their
paragraph and we'd read it out – this is before photo-copying - and say “what accounts, the universe made regular by the grammar that this person develo-
can we say about this from an ideological perspective?” ped.” So that was one thing. And on the other hand we have the Hallidayan
Theo and I did that with our materials. So a copy of Australian Woman’s chooser, the person who is agentively making meaning. And you put these to-
Weekly was our beginning. We sort of worked with that for a bit and then some gether and then you have, say, me looking at my own children and thinking
weeks later I went upstairs and got a children's book; a Ladybird book: what can "Are these little people, making their meanings, struggling somehow to be-
we say about that? And so we worked our way into images. Eventually that be- come fully competent, or are they, both in a Chomskian and Hallidayan sense
came Reading Images (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1990) book, and these early ex- - even though very differently seen - doing what people always do, finding re-
amples are in that book. We wanted to show that images have regularities, but gularities, making their meanings, but always with limited resources. In neither
we strongly felt that we could not simply use a theory and descriptions deve- the Chomskian nor the Hallidayan account is there a sense of deficiency; in
loped to describe a one mode for something that makes use of a quite diffe- each, makers of meaning are seen as competent in the use of the resources
rent material; and transfer categories developed for one material and the work they have – whether as adult or child. And there was the Hallidayan theme,
done with that to a totally different material and the work done with that. That which is, these are the resources and with these resources we shape the world
was an unusual approach. Michael O'Toole, who had also come with a Halli- of representation. And that's always with me. People, whether 3 or 30 years
dayan frame took the former route in his The language of displayed art (O'Toole, old, are intelligent makers of representations through which they represent
1992). He had taken the Hallidayan theory and the descriptive terms develo- how they see the world, whether in the way they make sentences or in the way
ped for language and used it for the description of image or architecture or they shape meanings in other modes… yeah?
sculpture. I think it is important to realize that most people with a Hallidayan
ancestry –Kay O'Halloran for instance, now working in Singapore, use Halli- FL: Yeah.
day’s linguistic theory and its terms, whereas Theo and I, and Bob and I be-
fore, used the semiotic aspects of Halliday’s theory. That’s a bit of the GK: I think an ordinary sense of respect demands that we treat what children
background. do as serious attempts, in the way we treat ought to treat all our attempts as se-

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rious, with whatever resources we have. We make our sense of the world. So it’s issue. That understanding can take me a step nearer to bring you towards see-
about dignity assigned to that making of sense. Human dignity, for me. As in- ing value in the kinds of things that I would like you to understand.” And so,
deed is Noam Chomsky's political project about social dignity as equality. And it's around theories of learning that the question of power and communica-
then, with that, looking at what children do and therefore never dismissing it tion as teaching and learning appears. Of course this is policed by notions
but making it my job to attempt to understand what was the regularity and and practices of assessment; and there I think that other kinds of criteria still
what was the vision of the world or the image of the world. And that’s for me apply.
the motivation. And that was in Language and Control (Fowler, Hodge, Kress
& Trew, 1979) and extended to the working out of power in all kinds of inte- FL: If we look at theories of learning then, what would you say are the main
ractions. To see how one could kind of equalize power difference from that po- differences between a social semiotic theory of learning and other socially ori-
sition. So that's my motivation. ented theoretical positions around learning that have become “mainstream”
today?
FL: In recent years you have worked with several projects focused on school
and educational settings of various kinds. How would you formulate this in GK: For me the question is “How do you get evidence of learning?” And the
relation to those kinds of settings and situations? usual practice is that you measure the distance between what authority says
you should learn and what you seem to be able to show as your learning and
GK: I would formulate it in relation to an understanding of learning. Because that is taken as evidence of learning. Or, you ask somebody "what have you le-
I think it translates fairly directly. In thinking of the problems of school, in arned?" Or, and that is the approach I take, you look at what someone has
many places, again, you can either think that children have become stupid or done and take that as a sign of learning. Put in Peircian terms, you look at the
you can say that children actually are as always fiercely interested and of good process of semiosis in which the sign made by someone for themselves in their
will to learn. And that they attempt to make sense of what is presented. What engagement with a specific bit of the world leads to their interpretation, to
sense they make of what is presented to them, in school or out, then becomes their interpretant. That interpretant is then the taking off point for the next
a matter of the resources they have, their interest and the attention that they sign, which is, in my terms a sign of learning.
pay to the world presented to them. The sense they make in school of things Social semiotics is close to Peirce in the sense that you process a form from
the school presents isn't necessarily the sense of the holder of power. So then the sign you receive – an interpretant – based on your position in the world,
the question is, do you want to say that they have been successful in confor- your resources, your interest at this moment. And then the new sign made on
ming to authority or should we attempt to understand their sense of what is the basis of the interpretant kind of gives you an understanding of who this
presented. Is our interest in conformity to power or in understanding their in- person is and why she or he made the sign like that. So, the notion of signs of
terests, their principles of attention and engagement? These lead to different learning is an attempt to say ‘this sign now, that I can see here, is actually evi-
notions of learning, namely, how have they reshaped or transformed the ma- dence of the process of engagement and transformation of the learner and
terials the school presented to them, questions about their transforming of then sign-maker, you know. An approach of “look at what people do” as evi-
these materials; the need to understand the principles they have applied in dence of a change in their resources, the result of learning, seems better to
their sense-making and learning. Then, on the basis of our understanding of me, even if not sufficient, especially in a context where signs are regarded as
their principles and their interests, how they understand, maybe then take made on the basis of the sign-maker’s interest.
another step and ask how then can we present the things which we think are
valuable about our culture? Because I do think that we ought to transmit those FL: So what would be needed in order to make it sufficient? How can we comp-
things to the next generation but in ways that allows them to make their sense lete the picture?
of them, ways that connect with their lives. I don't think we should expect
children to invent every kind of wheel on every occasion. But the means of get- GK: Well, I think ethnographers or conversation analyst are not social semio-
ting there are not by saying “I am telling you, this is what you must be interes- ticians. Conversation analysts document what happens in conversation. There
ted in” or “you have not conformed to my authority; you need to be excluded”, isn’t a notion of agency. And I think ethnographers, of course every ethnog-
but by saying “I must attempt to understand the principles you bring to this rapher does different kinds of things, but in a sense they all ask “Let's see

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what's going on”. In social semiotics there is a sense of, well here is a kind of GK: Yeah. Well, it's a political stance. But I think it would be quite right to ask
statement, what was the interest of the sign-maker to make the sign as it is. We about everybody’s motivation. And important.
have a motivated conjunction of form and meaning, to form a new meaning,
and it's that focus on agency and on interest which is the difference between FL: The issue of dignity is also related to the notion of interest, as you mentio-
say conversation analysis which asks “what are the mechanisms here?” or Eth- ned before. Can you give a hint of how to define the social semiotic notion of
nography which says “what's going on?” So that's where I would see the diffe- interest in relation to how the term is used in everyday language?
rence and a possible complementarity: the question “what is going on” is,
needed, I think, to complement a social semiotic approach, by giving further GK: Well, when you look at a sign, you see that not everything about the phe-
insight into interest, motivation and the shape of the environments in which nomenon that is being represented, seemingly, is represented. Something acts
signs are made. That comes back, really, to an ethical position. To say that by to select, to say “this is what I want to represent, this seems criterial for me at
understanding the conditions in which people make meaning we assert the the moment.” So I think you need some sort of label which names the process
dignity of the person who does semiotic work. or the principle behind that process of selection, which organises the selec-
tions we make at a particular moment, kind of to say “this is what this pheno-
FL: That seems to be an important part – something central that runs through mena is for me at this moment.” There are different kinds of principles active
the perspective itself. It seems like a very humane way of looking at what pe- and I think when you look at any representation what you see there is always
ople do and so on. a partial representation, selections have been made. And so you can ask about
what the principles of selection were. And then you can ask what motivates
GK: I don't know whether it's humane but its absolutely important to me. I the selection. And because I want to have a social theory, I say that a person is
think of the dignity of work, and when I walk past somebody who sweeps the socially formed in their history, acts in a socially specific moment, uses socially
street, when I go to work in the morning, I have an entire empathy with that made resources and all of this kind of comes into the sign-making. It is focused
person. I see the dignity of what that person is doing and that speaks to me. by the prompts to which a person responds; and that gives a particular sort of
What is this person is being paid, what am I being paid? I see the discrepancy, framing and so, because I don't want to go to psychoanalytic terms, I have cho-
I see a discrepancy in recognition of dignity. I see a discrepancy of social eva- sen interest. And so it is not more, really, than that. Needing a name for the
luation and in finding means for recognizing and changing that, there lies principles which organise the process of the selection about the phenomena
my political project. I wish to represent, call it whatever. I felt that interest links strongly to agency.

FL: The political project seems to be very closely connected to the theoretical FL: Sure, but it's obviously motivated.
project, in a way. Perhaps that could be seen as another way of talking about
motivation in relation to social semiotics as a theory? GK: Yes, because I do think it is interest. It is my position in the world now. You
provided me with a prompt. I have chosen to respond and sort of attend to
GK: For me? your prompt. I make selections from the prompt. I can't respond to all of your
prompt. So I make these selections. What is it that causes my selections if not
FL: Yes. some or many things in our social history. But not all of our social history. As-
pects of our social history condensed at this instant, in the environment of
GK: Well as you know, social semiotics has many variations already and it would the time, by the social relations active at that moment, you know. Attempting
be wrong to assume that everybody who calls herself or himself shares that to find a word, I am happy with interest. The question is, is there a plausibility
motivation. Very few people that I have spoken with foreground or share that in what lies behind? And if then somebody says “that's implausible, and its im-
view, and why should they? plausible for these reasons”, then I need to reconsider.

FL: Share your view? FL: To briefly touch upon some other central notions within the multimodal
and social semiotic framework, I sometimes find it difficult to distinguish bet-

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ween materials, modes and media in relation to “new” and/or transformed fi- rules, because you do need to account for how genre and discourse for in-
elds of semiotic work. How do I approach this? stance come together and in what ways they interact with modal choices and
interact mutually and what kind of recognition devices there are in an utte-
GK: I think you need to think in terms of ‘who is the community?’, ‘what is the rance – you know, the things we pointed to in that book, that allow you to say
community?’ ‘which are the questions?’. ‘What power is active?’ ‘When or how “this is a joke” or “this is not a joke”. So my interests have moved away from
does a dialect become a language, or not?’ So it's that kind of questions. It's a that aspect. And in fact, one of the things I am worrying about in the book I'm
social question, and a question of power, I think. And I think that Theo and I doing at the moment is that it says next to nothing about text. Because repre-
were right, probably, when we said that the older notion of saying “this is and sentation always happen as text. You don't see a mode come by itself. And I
this isn't ‘language’ or ‘music’, this is a mode, no that is not a mode” is much think, well, Bob's interests have moved in different ways, but I don't think he
better seen in terms of what a community chooses to regard as a mode, be- would find anything in this that he wouldn't recognize or be totally worried
cause it is developed to do certain kinds of things in that community which are about.
sufficient for the purposes that it's using the resource for. And, you know, the
difference between medium and mode is difficult, for similar reasons; because
sound is medium and it yet it gets made into different kinds of modes. And References
stone is also medium and can be made into mode. So I think it's about shifting Chomsky, N (1957). Syntactic Structures. The Hague/Paris: Mouton,
frames rather than asking about the older kinds of strict boundaries – that Chomsky, N (1966) Aspects of the theory of syntax. Harvard: MIT University Press
this community does this with these things and, you know that this is medium Fowler, R., Hodge, R., Kress, G. & Trew, T. (1979). Language and Control.
and this is not. Something may be being used as medium one moment and ap- London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
pear as mode the next – say, font, for instance. Typography might regard type- Halliday, M.A.K. (1975) Learning how to mean: explorations in the development of language.
face as mode. Can you make meaning with type-face? And can you make all London: Edward Arnold.
kinds of meanings – interpersonal, ideational and textual? I don't know, Halliday, M.A.K. (1978). Language as a social semiotic. The social interpretation of
though I think you can. It is not impossible to work it out. I'm sure that if mul- language and meaning. London: Edward Arnold.
timodality or this social semiotic take on it continues, some of these things Hodge, Robert & Kress, Gunther (1979/1993). Language as Ideology. London:
will become clearer or be made clearer. Of course, the moment you do that Routledge & Kegan Paul.
you would also move into the area of law-making, and then the social changes Hodge, R. & Kress, G. (1988). Social Semiotics. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.
in any case, and maybe the social then will move back to much more rigid Kress, G. (1982/1994). Learning to Write. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
boundaries and frames. Kress, G. (2003). Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge.
Kress, G. (2009). Multimodality. A social semiotic approach to communication.
FL: To finish off, you have said that your theories are in continual develop- London: RoutledgeFalmer.
ment. Have there been any major changes to social semiotics since your work Kress, G., Jewitt, C., Ogborn, J. & Tsatsarelis, C. (2001). Multimodal teaching and learning.
with Bob Hodge? Since then you developed the theory of multimodality toget- The rhetorics of the science classroom. London & New York: Continuum.
her with Theo van Leeuwen and some notions, like logonomic system for ex- Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (1990). Reading Images. Deakin, Victoria: Deakin University Press.
ample, seem to have disappeared. Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodal Discourse. The Modes and Media of
Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold.
GK: All the things we've talked about are about social semiotics and not all of O'Toole, M. (1994). The Language of Displayed Art. Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press.
those are in that book. And you're right, logonomic system is something I ha-
ven't taken up much. Largely because I have not continued with description
or analysis of text a lot. Because my interests moved more to an understanding
of mode rather than a continued interest in text or the social aspects of text.
If I were to return to text and its constitution and uses, I am sure I would ac-
tually want to have a much clearer and stronger development of logonomic

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