This book has a practical aim. It offers ideas and approaches for readers who want to understand and cope better with their world. Its angle on problems and solutions is its emphasis both on analysing language and meaning as key to understanding society and on society as key to understanding language and meaning. Its basic premise is that meanings are part of every problem and every attempted solution. Language and meaning are crucial for effective action. Analysing them matters.

Social semiotics is a uniquely powerful, inclusive framework for this purpose. It analyses meaning in all its forms, across all modes of language and practice. No other approach can match its scope, in today’s multimodal world as in the past. The book is oriented to practice, its ideas and methods always embedded in real-life situations, problems and responses. Its concepts, ideas and models come from many theories. Social semiotics here does not describe and illustrate a well-known body of ideas and apply them. In this book analysis is a laboratory for theory, and theory develops tools for analysis.

The book is not intended as definitive, either about linguistics or about social semiotics. It is embedded in my personal journey, researching such public themes as globalization, digital culture, critical management and postcoloniality and private themes such as love, madness and the meaning of life. I address many different readers because these themes are important to so many people. Many will be university students, from first years to postgraduates. Some may be in linguistics, wanting to understand how language and meaning connect with society. Others may be in sociology, aware of the ever-present role of language and meaning in every issue that engages them. Others may study other fields, such as psychology, philosophy, English, and cultural or media studies. All need a one-stop shop on language and social meaning.

I also write with general readers in mind: thoughtful, intelligent citizens grappling with problems that are usually generic as well as personal. The internet has supported the emergence of a new class of such citizens, sometimes called citizen-scientists, who use the net to cross traditional boundaries between experts and non-experts.

I use a minimum of jargon and explain all specialist terms. I use many accessible examples – mini-stories raising complex issues, mostly available from the internet. To move between my two purposes, exploratory and didactic, I italicize key points as they arise in the flow of exposition.

* * *

Disciplines are socially embedded modes of producing meaning. All students should know about the history and assumptions of disciplines they study. To set the scene for this book I use my personal history with social semiotics to reflect on disciplines and interdisciplinarity.

My story began with the 1968 student ‘revolution’, which swept through European and American universities, erupting into my studies of literature and classics at Cambridge University. This worldwide movement went viral across the globe without an internet. America played a key if ambiguous role. Its war in Vietnam was a catalyst for young people everywhere to recognize and protest against imperialism. Its civil rights movement was inspiring. The feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ changed the agenda. French, German and Italian theory was liberatory, interacting with practice in exciting new ways.

The movement targeted the dominant academic system, but its goals included wider social change and a key role for academic knowledge in achieving it. Forty years later those are still my goals, though I now see many more problems with achieving them.

Disciplinarity then seemed a device to divide and rule. The interdisciplinarity I wanted could not just combine tightly bounded existing disciplines. It needed a more fluid space in which to follow connections and build new practices.

I was drawn to the reflections of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci on why his own revolution in 1930s Italy failed. His concept ‘hegemony’ opened a door for me into unsuspected realities. Hegemony acted through ‘intellectuals’ to produce ‘the “spontaneous” consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group’ (1971: 12). Gramsci was imprisoned in the 1930s by the fascist dictator Mussolini, so he was fully aware of the role of material force, ‘the apparatus of state coercive power which “legally” enforces discipline on those groups who do not “consent” either actively or passively’ (ibid.). I knew that the repertoire of conceptual tools to dismantle the current hegemony must include political, economic and social analysis. I immersed myself in a search across the social sciences.

I also knew the tools to attack hegemonic systems must include ways of analysing the texts and processes through which hegemony acted to create ‘spontaneous’ consent and apparent ‘legality’. I saw that as my task. I was trained in interpretive disciplines, classics and literature, but it seemed obvious that linguistics, the official ‘science of language,’ was essential. So I turned to linguistics. Noam Chomsky inspired me in this thinking. His courageous politics impressed me, beginning with his critique of American power and ‘the new mandarins’ (Chomsky 1969) – unscrupulous ideologues of state policy employed in American universities. In his new role as activist the world’s greatest linguist taught himself political science. Chomsky’s linguistics (1957, 1965) also excited me. I was not sure how his politics and linguistics came together, but I was sure they did and would, in a powerful analytic tool.

In 1972 I went to the new interdisciplinary university of East Anglia in England, specifically to develop ‘English studies’, an approach later called ‘cultural studies’. I was fired up with the promise of Chomsky’s linguistics in a matrix of critical approaches. There I met Gunther Kress. Gunther had studied under the British linguist Michael Halliday, and he brought Halliday’s work into our mix. We grafted linguistics, drawn from the full range of current schools, onto the Marxist tradition of critical theory (Hodge and Kress 1974; Kress and Hodge 1979; Fowler et al. 1979). The result was first called ‘critical linguistics’ and later rebranded ‘critical discourse analysis’, CDA (Fairclough 1989).

Chomsky and Halliday co-existed happily in the pages of our book, but not in linguistics in the world outside. I sadly watched the wonderful enterprise of linguistics become mired in polemics, so virulent that people referred to ‘the linguistic wars’ (Harris 1993). Chomsky’s exciting vision solidified into a fiercely defended orthodoxy, excluding former followers such as George Lakoff (1968) and alternative traditions such as Halliday’s (1985).

Linguistics has been frozen in a cold war for four decades. It is long past time for peace to be declared. One task I set myself in this book is to use social semiotics for that purpose. Social semiotics creates a space in which the social function of the opposition between Chomsky and Halliday and their followers is seen as a struggle for position. Social semiotics can then do what it also does well. As a meta-discipline, it places the different proposals about language, meaning and society of these two great linguists in a more dynamic context. The result is not a synthesis but a new, more powerful, comprehensive linguistics in which different or complementary ideas interact and evolve.

I once told Halliday that I aimed to reconcile the opposition between his and Chomsky’s linguistics. He smiled sceptically and said: ‘I wish you luck with that.’ I do not know Chomsky personally, so I have not asked him what he thought, but I suspect I would be lucky to get even a sceptical smile.

Chapter 4 addresses this theme directly, and it weaves into other chapters. I hope both men will read this book and feel respected. But more important is that no one looks to linguistics for insights into language, meaning and society and thinks they have to choose between the two. No ideas are better for being kept ‘pure’, quarantined from interaction with other competing systems of ideas.

The ‘linguistics wars’ mirrored and were implicated in another set of ‘wars’. In the 1980s there was talk of a ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy and social sciences. Ironically, this movement was not a turn to the current discipline of linguistics but a decisive turn away. Given currency by Lyotard (1984), ‘the linguistic turn’ became a slogan for ‘postmodernism’, presented as radically opposed to ‘modernism’ and ‘positivism’, in a series of ‘wars’ across academia: ‘culture wars’, ‘science wars’.

Common to these different fields are the concepts of system and structure, a hotly contested legacy from Saussure (1974). They have been understood in different ways, in battles that have divided disciplines and departments. The constructed ‘war’ between ‘structuralism’ and ‘poststructuralism’, and of both with ‘empirical’ or ‘positivist’ sociology, tore sociology apart in the 1980s, and the influential sociologist Anthony Giddens wrote the obituary of both: ‘Structuralism, and poststructuralism also, are dead traditions of thought’ (1987: 195).

But this obituary was premature. Both tendencies are alive and well in different incarnations. In practice, structuralism needs to incorporate more of what it excluded: dynamism, process, causality, uncertainty. Conversely, poststructuralism has discovered more structures not fewer, more forms and functions at more levels, more tasks for new forms of structuralism. Poststructuralism complements and needs structuralism; it does not replace it. Nor can either be indifferent to ‘facts’. Likewise positivist sociology cannot ignore the processes by which those ‘facts’ are constructed and established.

Social semiotics is good at analysing metaphors (see, e.g., Lakoff and Johnson 1980), and ‘war’ illustrates the point. Declarations of war, natural and metaphoric, are semiotic acts which usually construct semiosic conditions in the interests of the declarer. In war, ‘truth is the first casualty’. That is a common effect of declarations of war, real and metaphoric.

Sun Tsu, in China in the sixth century BC, wrote: ‘All warfare is based on deception’ (1963: 18). He had two contradictory deceptions in mind relevant to the ‘linguistic wars’. One common deception in war is that contending parties have no real interests in common, no reasons for peace. Another deception is that ‘our’ side is totally united. I use social semiotics in this book to see through both deceptions and to disrupt the conflicts they produce and legitimate, whether these are between Chomskyans and Hallidayans, linguists and sociologists, structuralists and poststructuralists, or participants in Bush and Blair’s ‘War on Terror’. This is not to deny the reality of difference and conflict everywhere in social and biological life. Paradoxically, the war model replaces the complex reality of multiple differences and conflicts with a misleading binary, a single conflict between homogeneous combatants.

* * *

By 1980 Gunther Kress and I had relocated from East Anglia to different communication and cultural studies departments in Australia. There we became more aware of the role of new media in political and social life. An exclusive focus on verbal language risked our analyses missing the shifting new major sites of action. We recognized that our critical enterprise had to take on board semiotics, to study verbal language alongside all codes in all media. The explosion of ‘new media’ only underscored that message. But we remained clear that verbal language was still central in the organization of power and meaning in contemporary society. Verbal language was not obsolete. We still did CDA, but with more options. CDA still needed linguistics, but linguistics with a semiotic basis. Our enterprise kept its social imperative. We wanted stronger ways of analysing language and meaning involved in social issues and problems. We saw the emphases on semiotics and society as complementary. From this reasoning, social semiotics was born (Hodge and Kress 1988).

Semiotics has a complex place in linguistics. Partly this was because of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, a founding father of both linguistics and semiotics. Saussure (1974) saw linguistics as part of semiotics, an overarching framework for all forms of language, verbal and non-verbal. But most linguists restrict semiotics to non-verbal sign systems, understood as totally different from verbal language. For them, semiotics becomes a marginalized, irrelevant theory of marginal forms of language. Social semiotics restores Saussure’s original vision and takes it further.

Outside linguistics, semiotics had a different history. A ‘semiotics revolution’ flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, with such famous exponents as Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, Foucault, Eco, Metz, Goffman, Geertz and Hall. At first it was celebrated but not much used, then it fell increasingly out of fashion. But important recent writers still give their work a semiotic scope. Innovative theorists such as Donna Haraway (1991) and Bruno Latour (2005) use this scope to rethink the ontological basis of new developments in science and technology. After the counter-revolution, semiotics is surging back. This book is part of that new movement.

In its earlier phase, semiotics developed an impressive repertoire of ways of analysing meanings. Why were these not more commonly used? I feel they seemed too specialized. Semiotics became too formalist, demanding too much work from new users. Many analytic tools were formed in structuralist semiotics and seemed discredited by poststructuralism. Damagingly, the search for meaning drifted from the centre, and meaning was detached from the study of social forces. Social semiotics in this book does not emphasize formalism. It is a demotic strategy for pursuing meaning in all forms and contexts, always to understand society better.

In linguistics and CDA, work by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen has been revolutionary. In their theory of multimodality (2001) they pointed out the omnipresence of multimedia texts in contemporary life, where meanings come via different modes, only one of which is verbal. In a radical insight, they showed that even print media, previously seen as the bastion of verbal language, in practice used other semiotic codes such as composition. Likewise spoken language itself is fundamentally multimodal.

Multimodal analysis is proving irresistible because of the intrinsic limitations of monomodal analysis for today’s problems. Social semiotics provides a basic framework for theory and analysis of meaning in all modes, in linguistics and CDA as in other social sciences. Conversely, the many other languages revealed by semiotics, from non-verbal languages such as intonation to languages such as art, film or architecture, cannot be understood apart from verbal languages.

* * *

Many problems we face today have familiar faces: injustice, violence, exploitation, oppression, discrimination, alienation, madness. Social semiotics is part of a long tradition, but it also looks for new and better solutions. A book for the second decade of the twenty-first century must take stock of the current situation. Are there game-changing developments in what is happening in society and language? New challenges? New problems? New analytic resources?

All social sciences today are tackling the need to understand globalization as a set of forces and changes – political, social, economic, environmental and cultural. The causes and effects of problems regularly cross boundaries that were previously treated as fixed and absolute. So do the resources to deal with them. With hindsight, it is now clear that those boundaries were always less absolute than they seemed, and the flows were always there. In this book I deal with semiotic conditions and consequences of globalization in particular in chapter 8, but the theme affects every analysis. My examples come from a small number of key sites, always analysed in global contexts. To help readers to follow particular sites, these are listed in the index.

Choices of site reflect power structures in the English-speaking world, currently dominated by the USA and the UK. In a different book this imbalance might be taken to endorse the dominance of the dominant. In my case it responds to the need of those from the margins – settler colonies like Australia and Canada, developing nations like India, China and Mexico – to use critical social semiotics to understand the meanings of the dominant better than the dominant do themselves.

Intimately related to globalization is another game-changer, the advent of new information technologies. Social semiotics needs to take account of the subtle and obvious ways in which new media interact with issues of language, meaning and society. The challenge, as with globalization, is to maintain complex, comprehensive, flexible theories, not opt for simplistic responses.

I do not have a separate chapter on the semiotics of the digital world, though chapter 6 addresses some main themes. The theme of digital versus analogue meanings and technologies weaves through every chapter, a significant addition to ways of understanding the nature and limits of the ‘digital revolution’. The index provides a guide to the many analyses which deal with some aspects of analysis in a digital world.

I draw on recent developments in science as new resources for social semiotics. My fascination with science and mathematics began before I knew about linguistics, and my first job was teaching maths and physics in school. For me the hidden hostility I experience between the cultures of sciences and humanities needs addressing and resolving as much as the ‘wars’ in linguistics and sociology. In this book I draw freely on ideas from science in my interdisciplinary mix.

Especially relevant are the new alignments and alliances between science, technology and society called ‘chaos theory’ and ‘complexity science’. From 1990 I began to bring these together with social semiotics, aware that most colleagues in CDA or social semiotics were reluctant to do the same. More than twenty years later I am more sure than ever how important this connection is, more clear about where and why the links exist.

I am also aware how careful I need to be in bringing these ideas to non-scientists. Social scientists are rightly wary of writers who use the prestige of science to give weight to ideas supposedly from science. I do not ‘apply’ these theories to language, society or thought. Rather, I pick up phenomena in social, linguistic and mental life already recognized in academic works or in the public mind, characterized by turbulence, contradiction or complexity. These are usually poorly explained by linear theories but illuminated by specific ideas from chaos and complexity. Analysing these features of language and society in careful empirical detail can generate appropriate versions of these theories, rather than illustrating them.

This approach does not impose chaos or complexity on phenomena; it just loosens assumptions of stability and order imposed by linear theories. Linguistics needs to include non-linear concepts to deal with the hyper-complexity of language and society today.

* * *

I call this social semiotic practice a whole-of-linguistics approach to a whole-of-language object. This sees all the distinct branches of linguistics as aspects of a single, complex whole that is other than the sum of these parts. At the same time, these components are complex wholes at their own level. They integrate their own components at lower levels. Each of these does the same to lower levels, and so on. A whole-of-linguistics approach attends to the new possibilities of any whole but never loses the parts.

I also use a whole-of-linguistics approach to open up pathways between the present and the past. Many academic disciplines draw a boundary around the present state of knowledge as if it is all that anyone now needs to know. Those obsessed with being up to date insist that all references should be later than 2000: everything else is superseded. I believe this is a dangerous misconception, with pernicious effects on teaching and scholarship. My whole-of-linguistics conception includes many ideas and thinkers from the past. Many are largely forgotten, but they are vital parts of the intellectual gene pool for linguistics and social semiotics.

Sir Isaac Newton, a very great scientist, described his achievements by stating that he was a dwarf who could see further because he was standing on the shoulders of giants. Playing with this metaphor, I observe that some dwarves are bigger than others, and Newton was a very big dwarf. I also suspect that what Newton called giants were often heaps of dwarves seen from a distance.

I use this idea to guide the strategy of this book. I reach back to the long roots of the study of language, meaning and society, going back to thinkers from the past who made major advances to human knowledge. I do not do justice to other dwarves, but this strategy still helps recover the inexhaustible depths of this tradition.

* * *

This book combines an invitation to linguistics with an account of social semiotics. Sarah Lambert, then with Polity, asked me for a book to help social scientists appreciate the value of linguistics and to help linguists see new possibilities for their discipline. I agreed enthusiastically. But the tensions involved in this attempt illuminate the current state of linguistics. To bring out some of these I suggest how my book could be used alongside traditional introductions to linguistics – where the two could complement each other and where they might diverge.

I admire Bill McGregor’s introductory text on linguistics (2009), and I use it to see how these two texts and approaches might work in tandem. His introduction corresponds to my chapter on key concepts. He lays out theory, as I do. He goes back to Saussure, as I do. He points out the need for alternative frameworks, as I do. The main difference is in emphasis. ‘Total linguistics’ includes more theory and more divergence than does McGregor. But his readers could read my chapter with profit, and vice versa. His chapter on phonetics and phonology is basic for linguistics. I do not have a single chapter on this theme, but theories of multimodality provide a rich context for describing sound systems. McGregor follows with two chapters on words. This is more than in most introductions to linguistics. I have one chapter on words. Again, this is a relation of complementarity. McGregor has one chapter on syntax. I have one on grammar. The topics are treated differently, but our chapters are complementary.

But our projects tend to diverge as our books progress. We both have chapters on meaning. McGregor gives more importance to meaning than most other introductions to linguistics, yet meaning is studied in linguistics mainly as ‘semantics’, a narrow, formalistic study of a small number of aspects of meaning. For social semiotics, meaning is fundamental, understood in a wider sense, and it permeates all parts of the study of language. In the two books, ‘meaning’ is both the same and not the same concept.

Likewise, McGregor treats the social in four solid chapters, 30 per cent of the book. This is more than in most other introductory texts. But the account of social theory is thin, and there are no social theorists in his bibliography. In his crucial first part, language is understood as an autonomous system outside society. But for social semiotics the social is present in every act of meaning. Again the theme appears across both traditions – the same but not the same. Beginning readers might have problems bridging the difference, but if they could it might be transformative.

There is a similar challenge with my multimodal approach. McGregor, as a linguist, focuses mainly on verbal language, as a largely distinct object for an autonomous discipline. For social semiotics, verbal language is hugely important but not independent of other semiotic modes, in theory or practice. I claim that it offers a better account even of verbal language. Can this claim be inspiring for students of linguistics? Or is it too big a challenge?

My complexity approach is likely to be challenging in the same way. I try to show that traditional linguistics always acknowledged some degree of complexity, and that complexity theory has a place for linear analysis. But to cope with the scale of complexity of language and meaning I argue that the science of language and meaning needs to become far more fuzzy, more complex and multidimensional. Could creative teaching bridge the two perspectives in a single course, assisted by a book as good as McGregor’s in dialogue with mine?

Traditional linguistics still does some things very well. Linguistics books are treasure troves of different languages. McGregor’s is a fine example, referring to no fewer than 236 languages, including English. CDA tends to analyse only one language. I analyse nine, including English, but compared to traditional linguists I seem narrow and ethnocentric. However, my analyses integrate complex interplays of language and social meanings, so I need a first-hand grasp of how that language worked in that context. My respect for the many differences across languages confronts the demand to understand language–meaning–society as a complex whole. I work with more than one language, but far fewer than the many languages and contexts in McGregor’s book.

I mainly used three languages in this way. Classical Greek is a now dead language whose otherness confronts all modern European languages with their own lost history. I spent many years trying to master Chinese with sufficient understanding of its social meanings. My main guide in this task was Kam Louie, a good friend as well as a collaborator (Hodge and Louie 1998). I also use Spanish as a reference point. This is one of the current triad, with English and Chinese, of global languages. It is also the first language of Gabriela Coronado, anthropologist, linguist and acute observer of both English and Spanish. With her help I have been able to reflect on subtle processes of the two languages in the interlingual conditions which characterize language in use today.

* * *

I have many debts to acknowledge. Gunther Kress has been a dear friend, profound guide and supportive collaborator for many years. Without his interaction and influence I would never have appreciated what linguistics could be, under that and other names. Gunther’s frequent collaborator, Theo van Leeuwen, has been a friend with whom I should have liked to work more, had circumstances permitted. Through Gunther I came to know and admire Michael Halliday personally as well as through his work.

As this book will show, Halliday’s lifetime contribution to linguistics has made a crucial difference. So have some of his followers. Here I make special mention of the late Ruqiaya Hasan, David Butt and Jim Martin, as well as innovative scholars such as Annabelle Lukin, Wendy Bowcher, Ed McDonald, Alexis Don and Peter White. Other linguists have been helpful in recent times. Chris Hart convinced me of the merits of cognitive linguistics. Ingrid Piller showed me the rich texture of intercultural studies. Jan Blommaert showed me the importance of a globalization perspective.

In a different relationship, but still admitting a real debt, I wish to acknowledge Noam Chomsky. I heard him speak only once, at Cambridge in 1971 as I recall, but the impact of his work has been immeasurable. My first encounter with his writings in 1969 produced an inner revolution. He converted me to linguistics. My subsequent struggles with the later Chomsky have been important and formative, too, even if at times I was insufficiently respectful. In this part of my journey I owe most to Stephen Crane, who patiently re-educated me to appreciate Chomsky’s greatness.

My education in chaos and complexity theories owes most to two people. Vladimir Dimitrov, mathematician, mystic and lover of Spanish poetry, challenged me to go more deeply into a chaos theory of language. Lorena Caballero added biology to the list of sciences I needed to understand from a complexity perspective.

Among my formative influences, I especially thank my three children. Anna Notley provided me with many fascinating semiotic examples and read many of my works with insightful and inspiring comments. John Hodge contributed a level of critical social commentary over many years from which I am still learning. Jennifer Sultana’s reports from the front line as an inspirational teacher of ancient history and English have kept me in touch with what education should and can be.

In writing this book I owe four special debts of gratitude. Rodney Williamson, a good friend and valued colleague, drew on his exceptional range in linguistics and social semiotics to give me a generous, detailed critique of a draft. Teresa Carbó gave a warm, acute, meticulously scholarly commentary on the first chapters, as well as on the book’s concept. John Thompson, the author of influential books, was a formative critic of my writing and a creator of Polity Press as home for the work I try to do. I enjoyed working closely with Sarah Lambert, Polity’s linguistics editor, and with Jonathan Skerrett, who ably took over from her.

Gabriela Coronado’s contribution has been beyond acknowledgement. She provided insightful commentaries in the early stages as I was trying to formulate my ideas and a host of illuminating ideas as the book was progressing. She gave detailed commentaries on every chapter, as unerring with my faults in English as though she was the native speaker. At crucial points in my argument, when I felt I had lost my way, she shone a kindly spotlight on my confusions. I cannot thank her enough, as linguist, colleague and much, much more.