Well after it ended, the 2016 presidential campaign remained enigmatic. What parallel universe could explain how Donald John Trump became the nation’s forty-fifth chief executive? How could an experienced, supremely capable woman like Hillary Rodham Clinton be defeated? The punditocracy sputtered for a while after the final votes were tabulated but its explanations soon poured forth: The Daily Wire’s Aaron Bandler offered “Seven Reasons Trump Won,” only to be outdone by CNN’s Gregory Krieg’s “Twenty-Four Theories” for the election’s outcome. The BBC’s Anthony Zurcher proved a piker, only able to adduce “Five Reasons Donald Trump Won” and was further embarrassed by Howard Gold’s “Five Huge Reasons Donald Trump Won.”1 Still, Zurcher won the rhetorical war by declaring that Trump “had built a throne of skulls out of his Republican primary opponents.”2

Everyone has an opinion about Donald Trump’s tweets. Lisa Lampanelli, a professional comedian specializing in racy humor, finds his tweets remarkably disgusting. “I saw Trump be a roastmaster at the Friars Club,” Lampanelli reports, “but he doesn’t have the skill to do this kind of thing with the right intention underneath it. Is it entertaining to some? I don’t find these tweets entertaining in the least. It’s off-putting and it gets to a scary, bully level.”1 Folks working in the District of Columbia agree. “Stop it!” said Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska; “the Presidential platform should be used for more than bringing people down.” “This isn’t normal,” echoed her senatorial colleague, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, “it’s beneath the dignity of [the President’s] office.” Trump’s Twitter usage “represents what is wrong with American politics, not the greatness of America,” said South Carolina’s Senator Lindsey Graham.2

This section defines Meaning for the purposes of a multimodal grammar: the processes of making sense of the world using material media and their associated cognitive architectures; making sense of what we encounter in the natural and human-historical worlds; making sense to each other; our social and personal means of intending and acting; the patterns in these meanings and the traces they leave in the form of media artifacts; and the transpositions of meaning across different forms (text, image, space, body, sound, and speech) and function (reference, agency, structure, context, and interest).

If reference is that to which meaning “speaks” (metaphorically, because this is a multimodal grammar), agency is the patterning of action. Reference is the addressed; agency is the addressing. In this part, we focus on three prominent features of agency: event, role and conditionality. These are thoroughly named and analyzed in linguistics, though the complexities at times confound. They are not so thoroughly analyzed in the other forms of meaning that are also of concern to us. However, our focus is at a broader level of generality, one that crosses multiple forms. Agency is constituted in events (predication by means of which entity into action fold into each other; and transactivity or the relations of entities-in-action to each other). Agents assume roles (as self, other, or thing). Different nuances of conditionality are established in the relations of entities and action (assertion, requirement, and possibility).

Meaning directs our attention to things – in Part 1, we called this “reference.” Meaning tracks our activity as sensuous creatures – in Part 2, we called this “agency.” Meanings also hang together, with networks of interlinkage that create coherence, where every meaning is greater than the sum of its parts. In this part, we are going to name this coherence, “structure.” Analysis of the holding together in structures, we call “ontology,” or the philosophy of what things are, their being. We identifying two kinds of binding, two kins of ways in which things hold together in the work: in material structures (the meanings-in things themselves), and ideal structures (the meanings-for those things, the meanings we attribute to them). The process of interconnecting the material and the ideal, we call design. In forensics that analyze ontologies and their designs, we look for specific relations. This is to make our analysis more granular. However, heading the other way, towards ontologies with higher levels of generality, we find ontologies encompassed by more general ontologies, or metaontologies. Structures can nest with in structures.

Reference is a phenomenon both of experience and thinking. It happens when a focal point for meaning is selected by the meaning-maker from the infinities of the world. The meaning – taking form as a mental representation, an act or object of communication, or an interpretation – “stands for” something in the world. Reference involves the specification of particular instances and general concepts, their circumstances as entities or actions, and their properties as qualities or quantities. Things in the world might be identified as entities or actions, though, by transposition actions may be construed as entities, and entities as actions. Entities and actions can be particular – a single instance – or multiple, defined in their generality as concepts. By transposition, by way of conceptualization, instances can be connected to the general. This connection of the instance to the general is by means of generalizable properties, including qualities and quantities.