Volume 44, Issue 4 - Special Issue: Gunther Kress – Explorer of the Semiotic Landscape; Guest Editors: Jeff Bezemer and Theo van Leeuwen

This article addresses the issue of motivated signs in semiotic theory and practice. It examines two influential versions of the term, Saussure’s and Kress’s, focussing on and triggered by Kress’s influence. It claims Kress’s importance lies not so much in theory as such, as in his analytic practice, multimodal analysis, as underpinned by this theory. Accordingly, it deploys a version of this practice on Kress as he is ‘doing theory’. It uses his late work Multimodality (Kress, Gunther. 2010. Multimodality . London: Bloomsbury) as the main source of examples of theory and objects of analysis, and applies a similar approach to Saussure. The outcome is a theoretically-informed corpus including many examples of motivated signs in use. From this empirical corpus the article makes some indicative generalizations about the role of these signs in semiotic practice. It shows how pervasive these signs are, and how important these are for analysis. It connects them with a crucial but under-researched aspect of all social uses of meaning, the modality meta-function (checking validity/modality of all semiotic acts), in which motivated signs play an essential role. It reveals a more complex Saussure, more complementary to Kress, and enables more powerful multimodal analyses of social meanings and functions of text and talk.

This paper is a critical appreciation of some of Gunther Kress’s central (social) semiotic notions: i.e.,  motivation , materiality , rhetorical aptness and semiotic mode versus medium . These will be discussed in relation to four landmark models of sign-making and semiosis by Saussure, Peirce, Bühler and Jakobson. Based on these comments, the paper identifies the persistent difficulties current multimodality research faces in defining mode and in devising linguistically unbiased grammars of non-verbal modes. Finally, the argument is advanced that multimodal genre and discourse interpretation in particular deserve to be re-developed. The paper critiques Kress’s insistence on motivation as a universal principle of sign use and his overemphasis on materiality to the detriment of grammar, while praising his overall (social) semiotic legacy for multimodality research as far-sighted and lastingly influential.

This paper presents a conceptual analysis and critical review of the notion of ‘affordance’ and its uptake, transformation and application in the work of Gunther Kress. It traces its origins and explores how Kress, co-founder of social semiotics, (re)conceptualised affordance and incorporated it in his social semiotic theory of sign making, defining affordance in terms of the “potentials and limitations of specific modes”. The paper discusses how his take on the term was received, and develops a radical critique questioning the analytical merits of affordance. It concludes with a call for a return to Kress’s original question of exactly what it is about a form (signifier) that makes it suitable, in the eyes of the sign maker, for what they want to express (signified), and to consider materiality and social convention alongside the sign maker’s lifeworld, audience, situation, and conditions of sign making.

Against the background of a longstanding collaboration between Gunther Kress’s research group in London and my own research group in Stockholm, I reflect, in this paper, on the role of Kress’s ideas in our joint development of a social semiotic, multimodal, and design-oriented approach to learning, an approach which sees learning as performative, and as an activity in which learners create their own learning paths. I first discuss how, for Kress, this path has three elements, the affordances of the learning resources available to the learner, the learner’s ‘interest’ which turns aspects of these resources into ‘prompts’ for learning, and the learner’s active interpretation and transformation of these aspects, the results of which can then be recognized and valued as ‘signs of learning’. However, recognizing learning also needs to take account of the dimension of time, so as to make it possible to assess whether learners have gained knowledges and skills they did not have at an earlier stage. I then discuss the role of context in Kress’s thinking about learning. For Kress, context is another vital aspect of a social semiotic theory of learning. On the one hand, Kress focuses here on the specific, unique contexts in which individual learners create their own learning paths. On the other hand, he recognizes that signs will always carry social and political relations. Reflecting on the dynamic relation between individual learners and the way institutions regulate ways of learning, I discuss both the continued role of institutional learning contexts and their hidden curricula, and the way emerging technologies facilitate individual learning paths and interactive, participatory forms of learning.

In this paper I show how Gunther Kress, throughout his work, struggled with the contradictory poles of intellectual attraction that lead many other thinkers to firmly anchor themselves to fixed positions and safeguard themselves from doubt. I will focus on two issues, the tension between social determination and individual agency, and the tension between ‘critique’ and ‘design’. In his early work, Kress spoke of the individual as socially determined and of linguistic competence as a product of the social structure. Later he began to emphasize individual agency (and the agency of ‘communities’) rather than the power of ideologies and institutions. But the tension between the two continued to be felt throughout his work. Secondly, though Kress was one of the originators of critical discourse analysis, he later distanced himself from it, arguing that critique looks backwards and focuses on power and convention, while design looks forward and focuses on empowerment and innovation. But here too, the issue was never finally settled, and Kress recognized that critique and design are interdependent. Finally, I will describe Kress’s ‘exploratory’ approach to semiotics in which an open attitude to data, dialogue, and the interdependence of text analysis and theory-formation play a fundamental role.

This article is a practitioner-based account of the uptake of Kress’s ideas on literacy, literature and meaning-making in South African educational contexts, in particular, his integration of politics, semiosis and literacy. It examines the affective force of these ideas in South African classrooms in certain institutions during the immediate post-apartheid period from 1994 onwards, showing how Kress’s key concepts and principles provided a transformative theoretical framework for the work of progressive educators. A Kress-inspired framework propelled new conceptualisations of literacy and meaning-making in these classrooms and beyond – at all levels, from primary through to tertiary – and fuelled research from 1994 into the first decade of the new millennium. Given Kress’s insistence on the social, as in social semiotics, and his stress on the integration of representation, communication and situatedness, this article focuses on his ideas in context , how and why they were put to work and what their outcomes were. It is proposed that the South African case – although unique in many ways – may be relevant to postcolonial and decolonising educational contexts in the South more generally.