This chapter focuses on grammatical resources for enacting social relations – mood. A basic distinction is drawn between the systems of formal mood and addressee deference on the one hand and the systems of informal mood, stance and politeness on the other. Subsequently the systems of polarity, modality, participant deference, highlight, comment and expletion are outlined. For each system the relevant choices for meaning are consolidated in system networks and their realisation in structure at clause, group/phrase and word ranks is specified.

Spoken or written texts are coherent sequences of sentences. Text comprehension is equivalent to the construction of multiple mental representations in working memory. It is based on an interaction between external text information and internal prior knowledge information stored in long-term memory. Mental representations include a text surface representation, a propositional representation, and a mental model. They are characterized by different forgetting rates. As speakers and authors omit information which can be easily completed by listeners and readers, text comprehension always includes inferences. Listening and reading comprehension use the same lexicon and the same syntax but qualitatively different text surface structures. Due to local and global coherence of texts, comprehension is also a process of mental coherence formation. Limitations of working memory require focused attention on the construction of topic-specific mental models which are carried along from sentence to sentence by a flow of consciousness. Speakers and authors can direct this process through topic information within the text surface.

Godard’s extraordinary, demanding and unremittingly brilliant film, largely mocked and reviled, too often ignored, increasingly inaccessible can act as a kind of metafilmic analogy for the activity in the rest of this volume: its status not as a film of King Lear but as a film about the fragmentary possibility of making – or perhaps more accurately, not making – a film of King Lear, creating for itself a remarkably complex status as critical commentary on the materiality of what it is itself in the process of (not) creating. The chapter offers some brief comments on its commenting as a way to begin to think back over, as well as forward and beyond, the accomplishments of this volume.