In their canonical forms, text can be purely a matter of sight, and speech purely a matter of sound, though of course our meanings are all the more powerful when speech is accompanied by gesture, and text by image. 95-96.Ģ.51 MARY: These radical differences can be tracked back to the human sensorium. Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp.This makes speech more like music, or episodes of embodied action, than text which is more like framed pictures, or buildings with their spatially defined facades and entry points. You find the beginnings and ends of text in space (for instance, sentences, paragraphs, the covers books, the front doors or home pages of libraries), but the beginnings and ends of speech you find in time (for instance, an utterance or a conversation). Take what would you would think was the easy task of finding the beginning and end of a unit of meaning. And unlike text, speech is orchestrated or conducted with gesture, and so is closely aligned with embodied presence.
It is not possible to recover from having mis-spoken without declaring that one has something just spoken cannot be unspoken. Where text is ordered in space, speech, like all sounds, is ordered relentlessly in time. Where text is asynchronous meaning, speech is synchronous participation in representation, communication, and interpretation. Where text covers distance, speech is immediate. With text, you can look around for resources when lost for words, spontaneous speech must rely on memory. This happens in the old apparatuses of tables of contents, indexes, and library catalogues, and now in the digital apparatus of hypertext.ġ.18 MARY: I want to define speech as spontaneous oral and aural participation in meaning. Text also has a certain kind of spatial three dimensionality. Its purpose is asynchronous participation in representation, communication, and interpretation. Like image, it excels in carrying meaning across different times and spaces. Like image, text is laid out in a two-dimensional spatial array.
On the Differences between Text and SpeechĠ.0 MARY: One of the arguments we have been making through this grammar has been that text and speech are very different from each other, so different in fact that we can no longer use the word “language.” In this video we are going to bring these arguments together into one place, because they have been scattered across the other videos and the two volumes of our transpositional grammar.Ġ.35 MARY: In our rough visual map of forms of meaning, we have put text beside image, and image beside space.
Bogdanov, "Philosophy of Living Experience".What’s New about Transpositional Grammar.Transpositional Grammar: The Main Ideas.