New Books In Language

What do all these have in common: Disneyland and the Dreamtime, the shopping mall and the planned economy, Chomsky's Syntactic Structures and Halliday's Functional Grammar, Unicode and door handles? All mean something. The companion volumes Making Sense: Reference, Agency, and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning (Cambridge University Press) and Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning (Cambridge University Press), by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, are about being about: the topic is meaning, the activity in our lives which happens to us and which we make happen. Meaning is an inescapable fact of the universe, and though meaning may not be a defining trait of our species, we humans make meaning and add meaning everywhere and all the time. Cope and Kalantzis are at the top of their fields: intellectual history, education, communication studies, linguistics. In this two-volume set, though, Cope and Kalantzis bring everything they have achieved to another level. All of meaning