Meaning Patterns: An Introduction to Multimodal Semiotics

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign via Coursera

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Coursera
Pricing

Paid Course
Languages

English
Certificate

Certificate Available
Effort

6 weeks, 4 hours a week
Sessions

Self-Paced
Level

Beginner
Subtitles

English

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Overview

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What is meaning, and how does it work, not just in language but in images, spaces, objects, bodies, sounds, and gestures? This course offers a powerful framework for answering that question: a transpositional grammar of multimodal meaning, developed by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis. Rather than treating language as the center of meaning, the course explores how meaning is made across seven forms and analyzed through five functions: reference (what something is about), agency (how it patterns action), structure (how meanings cohere), context (how surroundings shape meaning), and interest (the purposes and cross-purposes we bring to meaning). Running through all of them is transposition, the constant movement by which meaning is remade as it shifts across forms and contexts. Through engaging videos and in-depth readings, optional AI-guided dialogues and discussions, and applied peer-reviewed essays, you will learn to parse real artifacts of meaning, from a painting or a building to a digital interaction, and see how they work. Designed for educators, communicators, creators, and anyone curious about how meaning works, this course requires no specialist background.e.g. This is primarily aimed at first- and second-year undergraduates interested in engineering or science, along with high school students and professionals with an interest in programming.

Syllabus

Course Overview: Introduction and the Meaning of Meaning

What could be more meaningful (and enjoyable!) than thinking about the meanings of meanings? These are the privileges and pleasures of semiotics, the study of meaning. This course will introduce you to many great thinkers about meaning, and you'll find people analyzing the ordinary and extraordinary things of our everyday lives: cameras, computers, cars, and more. This course is also about the media through which we mean: text, art, and now artificial intelligence systems. We organize the material around a framework we call transpositional grammar, which maps the functions of meaning (reference, agency, structure, context, and interest) against the forms in which we materialize meaning (text, image, space, object, body, sound, and speech). Join us as we figure out the meaning of everything! Beyond the sheer pleasure of it, the course offers helpful background for teachers, media workers, technologists, and anyone interested in the meanings of our meanings. In this opening module, we introduce the framework more fully and position it within our earlier work on multiliteracies, sharpening its theoretical focus. We situate the approach within a broad intellectual tradition, drawing on scholarship in linguistics, discourse analysis, and social semiotics, including the New London Group and figures such as Gee, Kress, and Fairclough. Its distinctive move is to foreground the functions of meaning rather than its forms, and to shift the emphasis from describing how we communicate to explaining how meaning works as a dynamic, socially embedded process. This is the course's central aim: to develop a comprehensive, functionally organized theory of meaning that reaches across multimodal communication and diverse domains of knowledge.

Reference

This module develops the first of the book’s core meaning functions, focusing on how meanings point to, classify, and represent the world. It examines the ways we identify entities, qualities, and relations, showing how reference organizes experience into categories such as things, properties, and processes. The module moves historically and conceptually, drawing on figures such as Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing to illustrate how systems of representation translate between the material and the symbolic, linking calculation, language, and perception. A key argument is that reference is not a neutral mirror of reality but an active construction shaped by available media and cultural conventions. It enables abstraction and generalization while also imposing limits based on what can be represented or calculated. Across examples, we show how reference underpins knowledge-making by stabilizing meaning, while remaining open to transformation through shifts in representational systems and technologies.

Agency

In this module we develop the second core meaning function, focusing on how meanings represent action, process, and change in the world. It shifts from the static categorization reference to dynamic relations, examining how entities connect through events and how actions unfold across time and space. Central to this is the concept of the event, where meaning is organized through predication (linking entities to actions) and transactivity (relations among entities in action). We show that different modes such as speech and image configure agency differently: speech unfolds sequentially in time, while images present simultaneous spatial relations, each affording distinct ways of construing action. We go on to argue that agency is not merely representation of action but a mode of meaning-making that structures experience through causal relations, interaction, and transformation, revealing how humans and materials participate together in processes of change.

Structure

This module develops a theory of structure in meaning, shifting to the underlying systems that organize how meanings are formed and related. It traces intellectual traditions from Arabic grammarians to Saussure and Chomsky to show how language and meaning have been conceptualized as structured systems rather than isolated acts. The module distinguishes between material structures (embodied, physical, or perceptible forms) and ideal structures (mental, conceptual, or symbolic systems), arguing that meaning arises through their interaction. This interaction is described as design, the process that connects the material and the ideal into coherent forms. The Structure module also introduces ontology as the organization of meaning categories and relations as the links between them, including nested and higher-level “metaontologies.” The module presents meaning as a structured, layered system shaped by both philosophical traditions and practical acts of design.

Context

This module establishes that meaning is inseparable from the contexts in which it is produced, interpreted, and situated. Meanings do not exist independently; rather, contexts actively shape what meanings can be and how they function. We explore context through six connected aspects. Through materialization, meanings connect to context by likeness (iconic resemblance), directedness (indexical pointing), or abstraction (symbolic convention). Through participation, meaning is fundamentally social, emerging as representation (meaning for oneself), communication (meaning for others), and interpretation (making sense of others' meanings). Through position, meanings are located in time and space, shifting in significance according to scale and location. Through medium, the material resources of meaning across text, image, space, object, body, sound, and speech both enable and constrain what can be expressed, and it is these differing affordances that make meaning multimodal, as one form complements another. Through association, meanings connect to other meanings serially (by nearness in time or space), by scaling (nested one within another), or through expressive causality (where a wider whole finds expression in a particular meaning). And through genre, meanings are patterned by their similarity to other meanings, the conventional kinds into which conversations, images, spaces, objects, and texts recognizably fall. Across all six aspects, meaning is never fixed by its context but is continually remade in the movement between a meaning and its surroundings, a movement we call transposition.

Interest

Here we argue that meaning is never simply shared or transparent, because participants always bring different purposes, needs, and positions to acts of representation, communication, and interpretation. Meaning therefore involves systematic incongruence as well as partial sharing. This module examines how these differences work through five aspects of interest. Through rhetoric, interests are expressed as direct and explicit appeal, whether relatively open (leaving room for interpretation) or closed (leaving little). Through program, meanings are pushed either toward sameness, which is assimilation, or toward difference, which is differentiation. Through reification, interest works implicitly, built into the seeming thinginess of an arrangement so that it appears natural and inevitable when it is in fact historical and therefore arguable. Through sociability, interests may be antagonistic, pushing toward domination, division, or forced assimilation, or solidary, working toward mutuality, inclusion, and productive diversity. And through transformation, we parse these interests in order to act on them, changing the world in small ways or large. Across all five aspects, interest may be complementary, but it may also be deceptive, conflictual, or shaped by power. The module culminates in the claim that the analysis of interest is not merely descriptive: by parsing hidden or unequal interests, we open the possibility of changing the world. Meaning is thus practical, political, and transformative, not just semantic.